MinC Is Not Cygwin

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Welcome to the MinC home page. MinC is a Unix emulator for Windows, based on the OpenBSD operating system. The MinC project originally started in 2016 and had been written to help children at vocational education learn Linux without the hassle of virtualization, but matured over the course of the last decade. It runs on Windows NT, version 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7/8/10/11.

MinC has a tiny kernel emulation (285Kb) which runs on Windows. The rest of the software was taken verbatim from OpenBSD, version 6.1. This means that by installing MinC, you run OpenBSD on your Windows machine at native speed.

I wanted the kernel emulation to be as simple as possible, so unexperienced programmers can contribute to the project. The project has already been discussed on Hacker News, but I plan to do a write-up with the design decisions I made.

October, 21 2025
883 downloads
€ 10.-- donated

Puffy, the OpenBSD mascotte

Install

To install MinC you no longer have to copy it "by hand". You can now use the new installation wizard. Download the current version by clicking the link: minc-6.1.0.exe (30Mb download, 100Mb on disk).

After installation you will see a new icon called Console on your Desktop. This starts the MinC terminal.

Antivirus

MinC works well with antivirus software, such as the built-in Windows Defender or Kaspersky.

In some cases you need to temporarily disable antivirus before downloading and installing (Kaspersky). After that, MinC works fine.

In other cases, MinC installs well, but the antivirus does not let you run its programs. You need to exclude the MinC root directory from scanning (f-secure).

Visual Studio

MinC can be integrated into MS Visual Studio Code as a terminal. Put following snippet in your personal settings.json file: 

"terminal.integrated.profiles.windows": {
   "MinC": {
      "path": "C:\\MinC\\sbin\\bsd.exe"
   }
}

If you installed MinC at another location, make sure the underlined part is correct.

Use

The current MinC release contains the following functions:

  • All Unix standard commands: ls, du, ps, df, find, grep, awk, mkdir, chmod, chown, wc, top, diff, etc.
  • Editing: less, vi, nano, hexedit, mg (MicroEMACS)
  • Compression: unzip, gzip, bzip2, xz
  • Networking: route, ifconfig, ping, ftp, ssh, scp, telnet, wget, lynx, mutt, BitchX
  • Security: openssl, signify
  • Development: ImageMagick, opencvs

Services and daemons, like Apache (httpd), Sendmail and sshd are not yet available, but will be released as soon as possible.

If you like to compile code for MinC, you can install the toolchain: buildtools-6.1.0.exe (58Mb download, 200Mb on disk). The package contains curl, git, vim, BSD libc, ncurses, GNU binutils, gcc and gmake.

Why not use WSL2?

Why not just use the Windows Subsystem for Linux instead? Just open the Windows Terminal and use the latest version of Linux. You can install any flavour you like: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Kali and Suse.

To answer that, let me rephrase the question: why does every institute out there, Universities, Government, even NASA and CERN, still instruct their users to install Cygwin?

The statistical answer is: if you have 400 students yearly, about half of them never get WSL2 installed, and by the time you find that out, the semester is over and they all flunked their tests and it's your fault.

The practical answer is: when using WSL2, you constantly have to manipulate your data remotely. This will be slow and awkward. Ultimately, you want the tools where the data is, not the other way around.

Donate

Writing the emulator took a lot of time. To help me finish MinC, you can make a donation via PayPal. Any amount is welcome.

Let me know if you wish to have a particular software included in the next release. Send an e-mail to dboland@xs4all.nl or create an issue at GitHub.

Latest release

This release is dubbed Monokai, named after the color scheme the terminal is in when you install MinC. I completed automating the build process and finally figured out how to do proper cross-compiling of the GCC build tools.

Now you can build the entire system yourself and experience the wonderful OpenBSD build process. For more information, read the BUILD.md document at GitHub.