14. July 2012

How to fix incorrect Cygwin permission in Windows 7

Cygwin started to behave quite strangely after recent updates. I was not able to edit files in vim, because it was complaining that files are read only. Even cp -r didn’t work correctly. Permission of new directory was broken and I was not able to remove it. Pretty weird behavior.

E.g. ls -l

total 2
----------+ 1 georgik None 34 Jul 14 18:09 index.jade
----------+ 1 georgik None 109 Jul 14 17:40 layout.jade

Hm. It is clear that something is wrong with permission. Even owner has no permission on those files.

Output of mount command:

C: on /cygdrive/c type ntfs (binary,posix=0,user,noumount,auto)

I found a solution at cygwin forum. It’s quite easy to fix it.

Open /etc/fstab and enter following line:

none /cygdrive cygdrive binary,noacl,posix=0,user 0 0

Save it. Close all cygwin terminals and start new terminal.

Output of mount:

C: on /cygdrive/c type ntfs (binary,noacl,posix=0,user,noumount,auto)

Output of ls -l

total 2
-rw-r--r-- 1 georgik None 34 Jul 14 18:09 index.jade
-rw-r--r-- 1 georgik None 109 Jul 14 17:40 layout.jade

Posted in Software engineering (Tags: , , , , ) | 12 Comments

30. January 2011

Developer’s problem: Windows 7 – apostrophe does not work

I found something strange. New default installation of Windows 7 had quite weird behavior of keyboard. Apostrophe, quotation mark, tilde didn’t work properly. I had to press apostrophe and then space bar to write single apostrophe.

The reason is that keyboard layout United States – International treats those keys as special. Here is quote from Microsoft support web page:

When you press the APOSTROPHE ( ‘ ) key, QUOTATION MARK ( ” ) key, ACCENT GRAVE ( ` ) key, TILDE ( ~ ) key, or ACCENT CIRCUMFLEX,. also called the CARET key, ( ^ ) key, nothing is displayed on the screen until you press a second key:

  • If you press one of the letters designated as eligible to receive an accent mark, the accented version of the letter appears.
  • If you press the key of a character that is not eligible to receive an accent mark, two separate characters appear.
  • If you press the space bar, the symbol (apostrophe, quotation mark, accent grave, tilde, accent circumflex or caret) is displayed by itself.

The following table shows the keyboard combinations that you can use to create the desired character.

Solution for developers and sys-admins is quite easy. Change keyboard layout from United States-International to something different. E.g. US.

Posted in Software engineering (Tags: , , , , ) | 15 Comments

26. January 2011

IntelliJ Idea – Windows – Git – The remote end hung up

I was trying to clone git repository. I had brand new Windows with Cygwin version of git. Intellij Idea displayed nice helpful error message:

fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

I found article at grublesmurf.org that pointed me to solution.

Problem was that Cygwin was using directory c:\cygwin\home\georgik\.ssh, but Intellij Idea was trying to read c:\Users\georgik\.ssh. I moved .ssh directory to c:\Users\georgik and set HOME variable to %USERPROFILE%.It is also worthy to modify /etc/passwd in cygwin to match that directory.

Posted in Software engineering (Tags: , , , , , , , , ) | Comments Off on IntelliJ Idea – Windows – Git – The remote end hung up