"I went to msys because Cygwin didn't come with a binary compiler (that I could find--people tell me it's there but I don't see it)." gcc has been available as part of the package for Cygwin for a long time now. It is in the "Devel" category. It is NOT installed in the default/minimal install. I recommend in general, when running setup (make sure you update to the newest) that you take a couple of minutes and click open the categories, it shows you what is available, where, and gives you a chance to make sure it is being installed. Many useful tools such as Perl, Python and GSL are there.... Current version of gcc in Cygwin is gcc-3.3-1 I think.... Wayne Keen
