NOTE: This project is no longer developed. Visit our main page to see list of current projects.

Notes for Cygwin Users

The main trouble with cygwin is the baffling back-and-forth-ness of paths, and when to use "/" and when to use "\". Here is what I've discovered:

Anything inside of cygwin itself, include make, gnuutils, and all cygwin binaries, can handle the unix flavored paths cygwin returns by default.
Anything external to cygwin, such as javac, jar, and so forth expect the dos pathnames.

The nice thing is that for the most part, the cygwin-build.sh script has been built to fix all of that stuff for you. The one exception is that when you are editing the cogbox.xml file to indicate the path to your CoG jar file(s), you have to specify this location in terms of DOS path names, since the things which eventually use this information are javac and java. Other than that all paths are fixed for you by the script.

The most fun you'll have is trying to figure out where your cog.properties and cogbox.properties files go, and what types of paths they expect. What I did was get the CogBox to build, then ran it and read the error messages about "File Not Found" to figure out where to put things. I was able to pinpoint the expected locations of every important file this way.

Here is a list of pertinent environment variables as I have them set in my cygwin environment here in the Extreme Lab. Your mileage may vary, but you can see which paths are used for each variable.

COGBOX_HOME="c:\\cygwin\\home\\administrator\\.cogbox"
JAVA_HOME="/cygdrive/c/jdk1.2.2"

On our NT box, my cog.properties file lives in "c:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\.globus". I discovered this when I ran the CogBox for the first time and an error dialog popped up telling me that CoG couldn't find the CoG properties file there. Here is what's in my cog.properties file:

usercert=c:\\cygwin\\home\\administrator\\.globus\\usercert.pem
userkey=c:\\cygwin\\home\\administrator\\.globus\\userkey.pem
proxy=c:\\cygwin\\tmp\\proxyfile.btemko
cacert=c:\\cygwin\\home\\administrator\\cog\\42864e48.0

As you can see, the DOS "\" directory separator must be escaped, otherwise cygwin will strip it looking for the control character. Be sure to copy your CA certificate file and your globus credentials over to your Windows machine!

One last thing - it is not a good idea to try to build the CoG jar file on some unix box and then transfer it to Windows. I had to build the CoG jar file on our Windows box before everything worked as it should. The CoG team has done a terrific job with using ant to make everything easy, and if you steal the cygwin-build.sh script from the CogBox directory and modify it to use the build.xml file found in the CoG distribution you'll be a very happy camper indeed. I did this and had a CoG jar file in about a minute. If you don't already have an ant installation you can simply copy the jars in the "lib" directory from the CogBox distribution into the CoG "lib" directory as well as the cygwin-build.sh script and it should work perfectly.

[Return to main page]

Last modified: Wed Mar 28 16:55:16 EST 2001