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. MinC was written to help children at vocational education learn Linux without the hassle of virtualization. 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 uncomplicated 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.

May, 9 2025
633 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.exe (20Mb).

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

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
  • Compression: unzip, gzip, bzip2, xz
  • Networking: route, ifconfig, ping, ftp, ssh, scp, telnet, wget, curl, lynx, mutt, BitchX, openssl
  • Development: ImageMagick

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.exe (58Mb). The package contains BSD libc, ncurses, sqlite3, GNU binutils, cc, make, vim and git.

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.