I bought a WD 500GB External HD (USB) and hooked it up to eddie over the weekend (setup, btw, could not have been simpler - literally plug in, reformat to NTFS, and play).

Soon, however, the problems began. bash randomly (ok, it wasn't random it was quite regular) shote itself with odd errors about being unable to fork or failing to allocate heap space. One time in four I was able to logon remotely through sshd, the other 3 resulted in network errors or connection reset by peer. A quick search through google turned up some registry hacks that "may" help with the problem, but not in my case. So, I hit Cygwin.com since I haven't updated in a while. There's not a new SETUP.EXE, but there are updated versions of just about every utility, including bash. Download and install updates.

After the update, I don't get the memory allocation errors anymore (I did find a release note that mentions one of the fixes in Cygwin v1.5.23-2 has to do with errors while trying to fork processes), but now the profile and .bashrc files all give "command not found" and "not a valid identifier" errors when trying to run a login shell. When I ran the Cygwin setup, I did not mistakenly select "Dos CR/LF Text Mode" (hell, the setup automatically selects the setting used during the last update, so there's nothing to do except hit Next unless one wants to change something), however, it appears that all these script files (and perhaps all the text files in my cygwin install, and I can't be sure since I haven't done an exhaustive search) were changed from Unix line breaks to DOS line breaks. Some manual d2u fixed that problem and I am once again in Cygwinirvana.

It perplexes me, however, that the "help" on the Cygwin lists so often consists of abusing the user when in this case, the SETUP clearly fucked up the files. Well, it's clear to me even if it's not clear to Larry Hall. Be ware, luser.