Prefix/Cygwin/X

This article describes my work on Article description::getting Portage to build usable Qt/Gtk-apps on Cygwin.

Preface
Before reading this, you should be familiar with "Gentoo Prefix" and "Prefix on Cygwin".

It would be useful, if you already set up a Cygwin/X system and bootstrapped a Gentoo Prefix on it. However, reading about the theory might be enough, as you'd have to throw it away later anyway. ;-)

Cygwin/X
Before thinking about bootstrapping, a working Cygwin/X system should be at hand. This is not as trivial as one might think. For best results some things should run as daemons, like they do on any GNU/Linux system. But as you are on Windows, this means you have to set up some of the Daemons as Windows Services.

Don't panic, that one is easier than you think.

Basic installation
I am using the cygwin setup.exe directly using a windows command prompt. That is quicker than searching&clicking every package together.

The following commands can be used to install a Cygwin/X system, that already enables Audio, adds a tray icon, dbus support, Kerberos ticketing, private key management, postfix setup, ssh access, system message logging and an xdg-menu-icon.

I bet you didn't know half of that was possible, right? Me neither until a couple of weeks ago...

Important: The *-devel packages are chosen so the later Gentoo prefix does not need concurrent packages to what is running anyway, or what is almost impossible to build on cygwin using portage. We'll tell portage via package.provided what's what.

You can combine the package lists, of course, and install everything at once.

Basic system
Install a rudimentary system that let's you start an X-Server and bootstrap Gentoo: