Glimpse and Cygwin - how to install Glimpse under Cygwin on Windows

Over the weekend I downloaded and installed the Glimpse search utility on my Windows laptop. Actually, what I'm doing is running glimpse under Cygwin. Because glimpse is generally just available as a source code distribution, I looked around and found a reference to a user who installed it under Cygwin. With that as my encouragement, I downloaded the glimpse source code and had at it.

Everything went very smooth. Actually, the only problems I had were related to my Cygwin installation. Because I don't do any real development or compiling on Cygwin, I didn't have the necessary C compiler or make facility.

Here are the basic steps I followed to installed the Glimpse search tool on my Windows laptop under Cygwin:

  1. Of course I started with a PC running Windows and an initial Cygwin distribution.
  2. I downloaded and unpacked the Glimpse source code. It came down as a tar'd and gz'd file, so I unpacked it in two steps like this:

    gunzip glimpse-latest.tar.gz
    tar xvf glimpse-latest.tar
  3. After that I changed directory into the glimpse folder.
  4. Next I ran the configure script like this:

    ./configure
  5. At this point I realized I didn't have the necessary C compiler, so I downloaded the gcc-core Cygwin package. Looking ahead I realized that I didn't have a make facility either, so I downloaded the Cygwin make package.
  6. Next I ran the two needed make commands:

    make
    make install
  7. When these steps finished glimpse and glimpseindex were ready to go. You can find out all about them here at the main documentation page and at the glimpse man page.

I haven't gotten around to running Webglimpse yet, but will do so soon. It's a cool search engine, especially for some of the techie things I want to search.