Cygwin 1.7 Released, Two Years In Development

Besides my sabbatical announcement for the Phoronix Test Suite's benefit, there is some other Windows-Linux news this afternoon. The developers behind the Unix/Linux-like environment for Microsoft Windows have announced the release of version 1.7.

Cygwin 1.7 delivers support for Windows 7, multiple Cygwin installations can now co-exist on a system, IPv6 support, the default character set is now UTF-8, support for new authentication methods, and tons of other changes. While there is now support for Windows 7, support for Windows 95, 98, and ME have been dropped from Cygwin. Cygwin 1.7 is coming after about two years of development work towards this milestone.

The Cygwin 1.7 release announcement can be read on their mailing list while they also have a what's new section on their web-site.