Installing GENESIS with Cygwin under Windows

This Mini-Tutorial on installing GENESIS with Cygwin under Windows was contributed by Avrama Blackwell at George Mason University.

Both the full GENESIS source distribution (genesis-2.3-src.tar.gz) and the binary distrubution for use with Cygwin (genesis-2.3-Cygwin-bin.tar.gz) contain a file "README.bindist". This has a section on installing GENESIS under Windows, using Cygwin to provide a UNIX-like environment to run GENESIS and other UNIX programs that have been compiled to run under Cygwin. The source distribution also contains the file "README.cygwin" with additional information on compiling GENESIS for Cygwin, and some other notes regarding the use of Cygwin. The Mini-Tutorial below gives a concise description of the steps required, and has been updated to reflect changes in packaging since the original README files were written.

• with Firefox or IE under Windows XP or Vista, go to http://www.cygwin.com
• click on install or update now to download setup.exe
• double click on setup.exe when it appears on the desktop, or run it if given the option by the browser
• click next
• click install from internet
• accept root directory of c:\cygwin or change it
• install for "all users", default text file type "unix/binary"
• local package directory: accept default or change it
• on next screen acept "direct connection"
• next, choose mirror site, e.g. gatech
• select additional packages:
  • from editors:
    • emacs
    • emacs-X11
  • from X11:
    • cygwin-x-doc
    • font-adobe-dpi100
    • nedit
    • xinit
    • X-start-menu-icons
• click next. If it lists files that are required, but not selected, accept them and click next.
• do something while it installs, then click finish
• To test, double click on the Cygwin icon on the desktop. This will bring up a bare console window for entering Windows and most UNIX bash commands. From within the Cygwin window, type "startxwin.bat". This will bring up an xterm terminal window that is fancier than the the Cygwin console, and can be used for running GENESIS.

OR

from the Windows Start menu, click on Cygwin-X, then on xterm. This will bring up the xterm window, without the plain Cygwin window.

Installing GENESIS

Open a web browser in Windows and go to http://genesis-sim.org.

From the "Get GENESIS" link at the left, choose "View all releases" and then download genesis-2.3-Cygwin-bin.tar.gz.

Put it into /usr/local (name of unix directory), or c:\cygwin\usr\local (if working in Windows and c:\cygwin was specified above as the root directory)

Start cygwin by clicking on the desktop icon.

Working in the xterm, type:

    cd /usr/local
    tar -xvzf genesis-2.3-Cygwin-bin.tar.gz

To test the installation, open an xterm window (not the Cygwin window) as described above, and type:

    cd /usr/local/genesis-2.3/genesis
    ./binsetup
    cp .simrc ~
    cd Scripts/Squid
    ../../genesis Squid

If you see the monitor filled with graphs and multi-color panels, then it is working!

Please report any problems or experiences using GENESIS 2.3 under Cygwin to the user forums at http://genesis-sim.org, or to the genesis-sim-users mailing list.