Cygwin is a Unix-like environment that runs on Windows. If you want to use SAL in Windows, you must first install Cygwin. For Windows XP, this goes as follows (please send us corrections for other versions of Windows):

1. Click on the Install or update now! button
2. This will request permission to open the file setup.exe
3. The next screens ask some questions. You want to Install From The Internet and may as well accept the default root directory c:\cygwin and Install For All Users. If you want to use Windows editors to prepare and edit SAL files, then change the Default Text File Type to DOS.
4. The next couple of screens ask how you connect to the internet, and then you are asked to choose a download site; pick one near you (from the USA, the University of Delaware site seems fast and reliable).
5. setup.exe will be downloaded and opened and the next screen will ask you to select packages. You can just click on the next button to install the default configuration, but
   • If you have no interest in Cygwin other than to run SAL, you can save download time and file space by deselecting XFree86,
   • If you want to prepare and edit SAL files with a Unix editor, select your favorite editor (e.g., ed, vi, or emacs) from the Editors entry.
6. The default installation takes about 15 minutes to download over a DSL connection, and another 5 minutes to build and install itself.
7. You should now be able to start Cygwin (it puts an icon on the desktop by default). You will see a tty-like window. Type pwd -- this will tell you the current directory in Cygwin terms. It should be something like /home/foo where foo is your Windows user name. This Cygwin directory will correspond to the Windows directory c:\cygwin\home\foo.
8. From Windows, download the SAL for Cygwin file into this directory.
9. In Cygwin, type tar xzf sal-2.3-bin-i686-pc-cygwin.tar.gz (the tab key provides completion, and the filename will change with different versions of SAL).
10. Then type cd sal-2.3 (or whatever the current version is) and then ./install.sh
11. Next, in Windows, copy the license file that was mailed to you to a directory somewhere under c:\cygwin\home\foo.
12. Using a Unix editor, edit the file .bashrc, or with a Windows editor, the file c:\cygwin\home\foo\.bashrc, and append the following lines

    PATH=$PATH:$HOME/sal-2.3/bin
    SAL_LICENSE_CERTIFICATE=$HOME/somewhere/certificate
    export SAL_LICENSE_CERTIFICATE
    ICS_LICENSE_CERTIFICATE=$HOME/somewhere/certificate
    export ICS_LICENSE_CERTIFICATE
    SALPATH=.:/$HOME/somewhere-else
    export SALPATH
    

    where somewhere-else is the name of the directory where you intend to keep SAL files (use a colon-separated list if there is more than one of them; the dot at the front ensures SAL will always look in the current directory first).
13. Finally, exit Cygwin and start it again and SAL should run nicely (try typing sal-smc --help).