Free Software on Windows (without any privilege)¶

Introduction ¶

This page indicates which free softwares I’ve been able to install on Windows 10 Enterprises 64 bits machine, as an unprivileged user (no administration rights) and how I did the installations.

UnxUtils ¶

UnxUtils provides ports of some GNU commands (ls, grep, sed, find, …). It makes possible to use those commands, in the windows command line (cmd).

Download UnxUtils.zip from https://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils. Create a UnxUtils directory somewhere and unzip the downloaded file to that directory. The executable files for the GNU commands are in the usr\local\wbin subdirectory.

You now have to update your Path variable. Open the system setting dialog (press Win+I). Type “environment” in the search box and choose “Edit Environment variables for your account”. Add the path to usr\local\wbin to the Path variable.

Open a cmd window. The GNU commands should be usable.

There is a problem with the find command which conficts with the windows command with the same name. To invoke the GNU find command and not the windows command, you have to prepend the exact path to the command:

...\UnxUtils\usr\local\wbin\find ...

To make live a little bit easier, I’ve substituted a drive letter (‘U’, but it doesn’t have to be ‘U’) for the path. So I can invoke the GNU find command with:

U:\find ...

I’ve defined the substitution in a startup.bat batch file:

@echo off

subst U: …UnxUtilsusrlocalwbin 1>nul

And I’ve changed the target property of the shortcut I use to launch cmd, by adding the /k option: %windir%\system32\cmd.exe /k C:\users\p006245\Documents\cmd_startup\startup.bat This ensures that startup.bat is run when I launch cmd.

Cygwin ¶

Cygwin is another solution to have on Windows the kind of commands (ls, grep, sed, find, …) you have on a *nix shell.

To install Cygwin as an unprivileged user, use the --no-admin option of the installer.

The installer prompts you for an installation type. I choose “Install from Internet”. Then the installer prompts for a mirror. https://ftp.fau.de/cygwin or https://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin seem to be good choices (not all mirrors have the full package collection). Then you can select packages to install. The default selection may be enough if you just need the basic tools (the Vim version you get in this case is vim-minimal).

After the Cygwin installation, you should have a desktop icon that launches the Cygwin terminal emulator (mintty).

Cygwin makes it possible to run graphical applications (e.g. gvim). If you need to run graphical applications, make sure to select the following packages for installation:

xorg-server
xinit
xorg-docs
openbox (there might be other window managers though)
gvim (if you need graphical Vim)

To be able to use a graphical application, you first have to start X.org, by running the XWin command in the Cygwin terminal emulator. Examples:

XWin

Or:

XWin -clipboard -multiwindow

The first example opens an “X screen”, and graphical applications will be displayed in this screen. The second example does not show any X screen, and graphical applications will be displayed in their own windows.

From another Cygwin terminal emulator, set and export the DISPLAY variable (export DISPLAY=:0.0), and start your graphical application (e.g. gvim).

Also start Openbox to get window management capacities (windows moving and resizing) and Openbox menu in the X screen.

See Windowing mode in the Cygwin/X documentation.

ccrypt ¶

ccrypt is a program to encrypt and decrypt file. The same key is used on encryption and decryption.

Download ccrypt archive from http://ccrypt.sourceforge.net. Unzip the archive and update your Path variable by adding the directory containing ccrypt.exe.

Vim text editor (and Pathogen plugin)¶

Download Vim from https://www.vim.org/download.php and run the installation program. Here again, you have to update your Path variable.

Launch Vim (or gVim) and get your home directory with command :echo $HOME. That’s where you have to put your _vimrc file.

Issue the command :set runtimepath?. It gives a list of directory. The first one is where you have to create the bundle subdirectory for the plugins.

Download the Pathogen plugin from the GitHub repository: https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen. It contains essentially an autoload directory. Place this directory in the same directory as the bundle directory.

Download your favorite Vim plugins and place them all in the bundle directory (each plugin in its own subdirectory).

Git ¶

Git is a distributed version control system.

Download Git from https://git-scm.com/download.

I always use it from Git Bash. I’ve used a ~/.bashrc file originating from Debian GNU/Linux with no issue.

You might be interested by my general page about Git.

GNU Octave ¶

GNU Octave is an interpreted language, similar to Matlab.

Download the Zip archive for the latest version (octave-9.1.0-w64.zip at the time of this writing) from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/windows, unzip it and run the post-install.bat file.

Once more, update your Path variable (add the directory containing the octave.vbs file).

If you want to be able to use Octave in text mode in the Windows console, make sure to also add to the path the subdirectory (mingw64\bin) that contains octave-cli.exe. octave-cli.exe launches Octave without graphical user interface.

If you see a warning about a failure to set locale, you need to add the Perl executable directory to your path (Perl comes with Octave for Windows in subdirectory usr/bin) and set environment variable LC_ALL to a valid value (“C” for example). If you launch Octave from the command line, you can do (assuming your current directory is the one containing the octave.vbs file):

set PATH=%PATH%;%CD%\usr\bin & set "LC_ALL=C" & octave.vbs

An Octave icon file is available in the Octave installation: mingw64\share\octave\9.1.0\imagelib\octave-logo.ico. That’s good to have for the case where you want a shortcut on the destop.

GNU Octave for Windows comes with MSYS2, and that is another solution (beside UnxUtils and Cygwin) to use the GNU commands on Windows. Launch msys2_shell.cmd.

Ada programming tools (Alire and GNAT Studio)¶

To install Alire, download the installer from https://alire.ada.dev (“Download for Windows” link) and run it.

On first use, Alire installs the Ada toolchain (the GNAT compiler and the GPRbuild build system) and other things (like MSYS2). If you have already installed GNU Octave, you end up with two installations of MSYS2, but it’s not an issue.

Make sure to add the bin subdirectory of Alire to your Path variable.

Then download the GNAT Studio installer from https://github.com/AdaCore/gnatstudio/releases (gnatstudio-25.0w-20240506-x86_64-windows64-bin.exe at the time of this writing) and run it.

GNU Privacy Guard ¶

Download the Windows version of GNU Privacy Guard from https://gpg4win.org/download.html and run the installation program. Right after install you can issue gpg commands in the Windows command line.