Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
Ralph Hempel wrote:
Yes, I've read the FAQ on making Cygwin portable :-)
I'd like to have a complete Cygwin environment on a FLASH
drive, but of course using that drive to compile stuff in
my HOME directory will be awfully slow.
Why is that?
Creating, wand writing files is much slower on a FLASH
drive than on a hard disk. Not a big problem for a few
files here and there, but if I'm compiling gcc and binutils for
cross compiling to an ARM (for example) it might be MUCH
slower.
Is there a way to create a symlink of a directory on a local
hard drive to the cygwin /home/username/ directory?
No, not across volumes. You could try 'junction', which does
something "similar" in Windows land.
Just similar enough to be dangerous from what I hear...
Are there any features in 1.7 that will make a portable
cygwin easier to maintain?
There will be no mount table in the registry.
This is, of course, very good.
Now that I think about it, one way that having a common Cygwin install
will help me is on my development laptop. I'm running XP as the host
OS and have a lot of virtual Win2K machines set up for testing in
clean sandboxes.
By having one canonical "known good" Cygwin install that's visible
as a shared drive to the virtual machines, I think I can get
what I want without using a USB drive.
Sorry for the noise, just musing aloud I guess...
Ralph
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