resistance is obsolete ™ ;-)

Installation on Windows

The project currently does not provide prebuild binaries for Windows. There are basically three ways to attempt to run OGo on Windows: port to Cygwin, run with GNUstep for Windows and run in VMware. Only the last option is well tested and works fluently.

Please let us know, if you have additional suggestions and tips on how to run OGo on the Windows platform!

Cygwin

Cygwin is a Linux "library" (DLL) for Windows. It provides Linux API on Windows and supplies most of the GNU tools required to build software like OpenGroupware.org.
It is probably the easiest way if you attempt to port OGo to Windows. We didn't try, but it might be quite possible that OGo compiles out of the box with Cygwin.
In case you managed to port OGo to Cygwin, please let us now!. Feel free to contact the developer mailing list if you have any questions regarding a port.

An option similiar to Cygwin is Windows Services for Unix by Microsoft. This is also an environment to port Unix applications to Windows.

GNUstep on Windows

An older version (v3.5) of the predecessor of OpenGroupware.org, SKYRiX 4.1, actually did compile on Windows using the MinGW environment. MinGW is different from Cygwin in that it doesn't emulate the Linux API but makes the GNU tools (gcc, etc) directly work with Windows. In other words, MinGW applications are real, native Windows applications.
A good starting point to port OGo to Windows/MinGW is to use GNUstep, which already runs quite well on Windows with MinGW.
While a Windows port is not a strategic goal of OGo, this is the intended way to provide one.

You can find precompiled GNUstep Windows packages over here: ftp.gnustep.org.

VMware

This option runs rock solid, fast and is well tested for years. Just install one of the Linux distributions (eg Debian) inside VMware running on Windows. The VMware approach is very similiar to the approach used by Java based solutions (run a virtual machine, in this case Intel ix86). The advantage is that VMware is much faster than a Java virtual machine given that the instruction set matches (both client and server use the ix86 instruction set).
And: VMware is now available for free! :-)

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