Cygwin is a really well done emulation that ports quite alot of unix/linux functionality.

I've compiled, with slight changes sometimes, none the other, almost everything that I have downloaded and attempted to try. If you are running Win2k/NT you can start a service using cygwin that lets telnet, ftp, etc transparently, otherwise you probably have to keep a terminal open and run it as a background process. (You can find the link on how to do this at )

I actually ran X11 and WindowMaker under Cygwin just to see if it could be done. It seems well worked and pretty stable. Everything on it was ported with it, Odd huh, and it includes all the normal set of linux tools as well as a large selection of packages when you install it that you can choose (Apache, X11, ftp, Emacs, etc).

The manufacturer is Red Hat and it's freeware (commercial if you don't want to be limited to GPL). The site is:


Kaylus@Solice