That's kind of cool, if a bit perverse. A much more practical solution is a headless Virtual Box running Ubuntu, which you SSH into and can install anything via

That's kind of cool, if a bit perverse. A much more practical solution is a headless Virtual Box running Ubuntu, which you SSH into and can install anything via apt-get, etc... I recently started using this on OS X (via Vagrant) and it's super useful, for instance having access Linux LaTeX packages instead of having to deal with MacTex (MacTex is probably fine, but the 1.5 gb download was crawling for me, while `apt-get install texlive` took a few minutes) For Windows I would imagine it would be even more useful, since fewer Unix tools are immediately available. I think I would probably prefer this to Cygwin, which was always a bit weird for me.