Installing Python inside Cygwin

Notes thankfully cribbed from http://atbrox.com/tag/cygwin/

Step 1 – Install Cygwin: If you haven’t already, Cygwin can be installed from http://www.cygwin.com. Click the “View” button once to get a full list of available packages. Make sure to include at least the following packages (the numbers in the parentheses indicate the versions used at the time of writing):

python
python-paramiko --> Seems to be used as python2-paramiko or python3-paramiko
python-crypto  
gcc  
wget 
openssh 

Now would also be a good time to install other common packages such as vim, git, etc.—but you can always go back and install them at a later time.

Note that we are using Cygwin Python rather than the standard Windows Python.

Step 2 - type 'python" inside cygwin, and see that there are no errors.

Step 3 – Install setuptools: Setuptools are required for installing the rest of the required Python packages. Instructions for Cygwin are found at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools. But you should just be able to do this within Cygwin:

wget https://pypi.python.org/packages/2.7/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg#md5=fe1f997bc722265116870bc7919059ea
sh setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg

Step 4 - Inside cygwin, use easy_install to install requests and psutil. paramiko is already installed.

easy_install requests
easy_install psutil

I gave up at this point, because cygwin couldn't find requests after I installed it. Maybe there's some PATH problems or ???. I also saw people on the web having problems with requests in cygwin, so maybe it's not really possible. Don't know.

Don't think it's worth pursuing python install at the windows cmd line, as opposed to cygwin..so didn't try that.