Quickly Install Cygwin for Data Science

Background

Cygwin is a full Unix environment simulator for Windows OS PCs. It is a little harder to set up and use than `putty`, but it allows more flexibility and the use of text configuration files to set up all of your connections. For `putty`, you have to enter each one individually and it is very difficult to transfer this setup from machine to machine when you get a new computer.

Motivation

The base installation of Cygwin doesn’t install all of the packages that are needed for an R&D Data Scientist whose work benefits from a wide array of tool sets and packages. It is also very annoying to search for each of the packages that you need. Consequently, I am sharing a mirror of my installation, i.e. my list of packages, which is utilized across multiple data science teams at my company. Hopefully, it is a superset of the packages you will need for your day-to-day work. Worst case, it provides most of the packages that you will need. Please comment if you find a package that is useful to you with an explanation of why!

To begin:

1. Download `setup-x86_64.exe` from http://cygwin.com/install.html
2. Install the base installation without specifying packages.
3. You can clone an existing Cygwin installation. To do that, we generate a “package list,” or list of packages to be installed, as detailed in the next section. Alternatively, you may use the package list I’ve attached below. I…