Cygwin
From Aventine Solutions
A framework and package manager for Windows to make available lot's of Unix-like commands and open source utilitties. For me, it's a must, but a lot of people complain it's too heavy duty and finding just exactly what you need is tedious. The trick is carefully going through the list of available packages and clicking only those you need (OK, it does take a little thought and effort). It has it's own style package manager, but if you are used to Fink, apt or yum, you'll feel right at home.
Here's the list of packages I check off on a fresh install (beside those that are automatically selected):
| emacs, emacs-X11 | a text editor (if you don't know it by now, use something else) |
| gcc | C compiler upgrade helper |
| ncftp | improved FTP client |
| openssh | OpenSSH server and client programs |
| rsync | fast remote file transfer program |
| ruby | the object-oriented interpreted programming language |
| subversion | Subversion revision control command line client |
| xorg-x11-base | X11 so mainly I can run real xterms |
| zsh | The Z-Shell |
| zip,unzip | command line zlib compression and decompression |
