Windows binary setup

The binary LilyPond setup for Windows is in fact a Cygwin installation, including the LilyPond package for Cygwin.

If you run Windows NT, 2000 or XP, please become administrator first; installing as an ordinary user does not seem to work on certain Windows-NT variants. Download and run setup.exe. You will be asked some questions. If you are unsure just click "Next". Do not change the default install directory c:/cygwin. Do not change the default text type UNIX, i.e., do not use DOS mounts.

In the Package View dialogue window, click on the Publishing section to view the available publishing software for Cygwin. Make sure that LilyPond is selected. If this is a new or first installation, click on Skip to select.

This installs LilyPond, and Cygwin, GUILE, Python, teTeX (MikTeX is not supported). If you already have some of that software under c:/cygwin, then don't worry: nothing will be installed twice.

Additional software

If you install the Cygwin's XFree86 X11 window system, tetex-x11 and ghostscript-x11 packages too, you can view the dvi output doing xdvi test.dvi.

LilyPond needs a PostScript/PDF viewer to be really useful. At this time (Sun Aug 11 2002), such software is not available in Cygwin, so you must use native Windows software instead.

Ghostview.
You can use GSView-2.6. This old package has two advantages. It has gsview and ghostscript bundeled, and it doesn't popup Register Now|Cancel windows all the time.

Install GSView-2.7 (GhostView for Windows), or visit ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/.

If you need to view PDFs, or want to create PDFs using GSView, you can install the newer versions GSView-3.6 and GhostScript-6.50. You get annoying Register Now|Cancel popups, though.

Install GSview-3.6 and GhostScript-6.50, or visit the Ghostview and GSview site.

Note: ftp.cs.wisc.edu has moved the ghostscript/ghostview distribution to a rather unreliable server.