Nerd Post: Cygwin, Omnet++, and the Mobility Framework

So, most of the people that usually read this blog will not be interested at all in the post. It's ok, skip reading it. It will bore you to tears unless you are an ad hoc networks researcher that needs to install a simulation tool. See, you're bored already. So stop reading.

The reason why I am adding this post to my blog is to hopefully help others, who, like me, may have been tearing their hair out just simply trying to install some freaking software that they need to do their work; namely, with installing Omnet++ and the Mobility Framework using Cygwin. (Mini rant: why is it still so difficult to install Unix-based software in the year 2008? Seriously, people, we've been doing this programming thing for 30+ years now. You'd think it'd be a lot easier than it is now. Put that down on my list of random things I'd like to change when I have time.)

So, here's a little nugget of information about installing Omnet's Mobility Framework with Cygwin that is buried in one of the forums and isn't easily found:

1. The mkmk script tries to build the MF with shared libraries
2. Cygwin doesn't support shared libraries
3. There is a simple fix to this. Instead of using the Linux mkmk script to make all the makefiles you'll need to compile the MF, you'll modify the mkmk.mac script that is designed for use with the Mac OS X, which gives you the option of not using shared libraries.
3a. Open mkmk.mac
3b. Comment out the lines related to using shared libraries and uncomment the ones for compiling without shared libraries. Save mkmk.mac
3c. Run the modified script: ./mkmk.mac
3d. Your makefiles have been created and you won't be using shared libraries. Go ahead and run make!