To add to my ongoing slow fiddle with DragonFly: I’ve noted how to install in Hyper-V, and how to use Cygwin to connect to run X. Here’s another step: if you are using PuTTY/Pageant, as I am, and want to connect, Cygwin/X needs to be told to listen on TCP. Find your /usr/bin/startxwin file in Cygwin and change serverargs to:
serverargs=”-listen tcp”
And then in PuTTY, under Connection -> Session -> X11, check “Enable X11 forwarding”, set X display location to “:0.0”, and locate your .Xauthority file. It will be in your user’s Cygwin home directory. (tips found here)
plink can be used to create shortcuts – open an xterm directly into your DragonFly VM from your Windows desktop, for instance, with a shortcut that runs ‘plink <sessionname> xterm’.
If you are running a slightly newer version of Windows and aren’t trying to accommodate a ‘legacy’ PuTTY install, using Windows Subsystem for Linux may work better; I have not yet tried.
i would recommend VcXsrv (https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/), it is a nativ build of X.org for Windows, together with Putty (or even Kitty http://www.9bis.net/kitty/) you can uninstall cygwin for good. Btw. you can add all this softwareusing the Chocolatey “package manager” (https://chocolatey.org/).
VcXsrv looks nice, but it doesn’t have all the other non-X software that cygwin does, does it?
I keep meaning to use Chocolatey more, which may provide that other material anyway.
Yes, VcXsrv is just the X-Server. If you want unix tools on your windows, you can install https://gitforwindows.org/ (again via chocolatey ;-), which brings a lot of often used tools along. I like it better than cygwin, although they share a common history.
Or you can install your favourite Linux Distro ( yeah, i know…)
1.) from the Microsoft Store
2.) manually (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-manual)
and use those. It works pretty well, in my use cases.
Linux on Windows still feels wrong.