[Mingw-users] Trouble getting started with msys 1.0.5

[Mo D. <su...@ba...>]

Hi all.

I downloaded msys 1.0.5 the other day. It shows a lot of promise but
I ran into a number of "getting started" issues that would no doubt
keep new users from making the most of msys. I am running under
Win98 in case that matters.

First off, I was unable to run msys via the shortcut because it claims that
rxvt can't be found. I looked in the .bat file but I was unable to find
where it set the PATH. I thought about setting the PATH just before
running rxvt in the mssys.bat file, but I could not figure out how
to get the fully qualified path name of the bin directory so I
was not sure that was such a good idea. I found that I could get
rxvt to run by launching it like so:

start bin/rxvt.exe ...

I also tried running a cd command just before the start command
and that also worked:

cd bin
start rxvt ...

At this point I noticed the following comment in the bat file:

rem ember to set the "Start in:" field of the shortcut.

I then opened up the msys shortcut properties, went to
the program tab, and set the Working property to "bin".
That also worked, so I assume that this third approach
is what was intended but jusy got left out of this release.

I also noticed a couple of other problems in the .bat file.
The @echo off needs to be at the top of the file to stop
it from writing the header file to the screen when the
bat file runs. Also the <fo...@ba...> line in the
bat file makes it generate an error claiming a file
redirect could not be found. If you remove the < and >
characters the problem goes away.

After getting these path problems worked out, I ran into
this error from /bin/sh:

': not a valid identifier
': not a valid identifier
': not a valid identifier
': not a valid identifier
: command not found
: command not found
'h: /etc/profile: line 20: syntax error near unexpected token `do
'h: /etc/profile: line 20: `for i in /etc/profile.d/*.sh ; do
sh-2.05a$ 

I ran the following commands suggested on the mailing list to
fix this.

cd /etc
tr -d '\r' < profile > profile.new
mv profile.new profile

The release notes mentioned that this problem was fixed, but it appears
that is not the case. These two problems along with the fact that a second
window is opened for rxvt are going to be a major pain for new users.

After restarting rxvt via the shortcut, I got the
following error on startup:

mkdir: cannot open current directory: Permission denied

It seems that mkdir is generating a misleading error. The
/home/$USER dir is getting created by /etc/profile. Try
deleting the /home dir in the explorer and then running
the following to reproduce this error:

$ mkdir -p /home/Default
mkdir: cannot open current directory: No such file or directory

The other problem I noticed was with vim. When I try to start
vim (or vi) I get the following error:

terminal capability cm required:

I have to quite after that since I can't edit anything.

P.S.
Would it be possible to include a less.exe in the msys
distro?

cheers
Mo