I'm pretty sure you don't need X if all you want to do is compile (many days of Gentoo experience!).

The other thing which drove me crazy for a while is that in Linux (just as in Windows) the command has to be in your path. So even if you've installed tar, you might get an error message. And if you switch user (to su for example), that user might have a different path.

That said, I've just done a default cygwin install and tar is there AND it's in the default user path.

You can actually access the windows folders and drives. They are under /cygdrive, so for example c:\myfolder is /cygwin/c/myfolder. However, if the drive itself is NTFS you probably won't be able to write to it.

While Cygwin provides a Linux-like environment, its not Linux, there's no Linux kernel involved. I/O is still being handled by Windows therefore you will be able to write to an NTFS partition, run your windows command line utilities, launch gui apps etc in Cygwin bash shell.

You guys are probably correct about this program in particular, but reading his/her original post left me with the impression that he didn't understand exactly what cygwin looks like or does. Regardless, I think that he/she has disappeared for a little while.

Good point; hadn't thought about that.

cd /cygdrive/c/program\ files/dragonheart/circle-3.1