Cygwin is a popular solution to use Linux/Unix applications on windows. Cygwin provides a POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) compliant environment for development and execution of *Nix programs. Cygwin is available for x86 64 bits.

To install cygwin, one needs to use the setup.exe file which lets one select a list of packages to install, downloads it and finally installs it. However, one needs to go through the same process to update or install new components. I wanted to have a solution like ubuntu’s apt-get package manager to quickly install packages without having to go through the GUI. To this end, I tried a quick google search and found apt-cyg.

As described in the readme in the git repository, installation of apt-cgy is pretty straightforward.

lynx -source rawgit.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/master/apt-cyg > apt-cyg
install apt-cyg /bin

Once installed, you can install other packages by running

apt-cyg install <packageName>

This nice utility has made my life much easier.