HowTo for compiling emboss under windows

[voltigeur at worldonline.ch]

Hello,

>No, you cannot compile EMBOSS as distributed without a POSIX emulation
>layer like Cygwin.  There are other comparable systems like MKS (all
>commercial, I believe), but to do a native Windows port, you would
>need to modify EMBOSS.  Someone has posted to this list in the past
>few months about this, check the archives.

Yes, that's what I was thinking about.

>Cygwin does also provide X, though it's a big download if you don't
>otherwise need it.  Can you generate graphics without X?  I know that
>Cygwin provides libpng, for example, but I haven't investigated
>whether EMBOSS can use it.

Installing X was one of the things I did at first, but since X
doesn't seem to be used (plplot looks to be more useful, with
an optional png output), I prefered to go on without it.

>I think you migh have this backwards.  Wordpad can handle UNIX
>end-of-line characters, but notepad cannot.  And Cygwin provides vi
>and emacs. :-)

Yes, I've tried every text format available in notepad, wordpad and 
word with no luck. But I knew one of them was supposed to work. It
seems I guessed the wrong one. I even tried xemacs (which is not part
of cygwin) but wasn't courageous enough to try vi.

>If you want to run EMBOSS programs from the Windows command line,
>then add C:\cygwin\bin to your Windows PATH somehow.  (But why not use
>Cygwin bash if you've got it?)

I changed the PATH but that did not work... After compiling
jemboss I found out that when running jemboss, it was calling
wossname to build the GUI and to get the list of all emboss programs
available. Of course it was calling it the java-windows way (and not
the cygwin way) and the result was a "missing cygwin1.dll library".

Thanks for your remarks,

Olivier Martin