If you’ve been running E-Business Suite Release 11i on Windows, you’ve likely been annoyed by the fact that certain installation and maintenance tasks depend on UNIX shell scripts.  To make these UNIX scripts work in Windows environments, your only certified option until recently was to use MKS Toolkit.

Cygwin logo:


Those days are over.  Now, in place of the costly MKS Toolkit, you can use Cygwin — an open source alternative — to administer your E-Business Suite Release 11i environment. 

For the full installation documentation, see:
The Usual Caveats

Not surprisingly, this configuration has a couple of warnings and disclaimers:
  1. Cygwin is free software and is not supported unless you purchase a support contract from a third party. Oracle recommends MKS toolkit for all critical production and test systems.
  2. MKS toolkit is required if you are using Discoverer 4i with Apps 11i.
The second disclaimer about Discoverer 4i shouldn’t concern most of you, since you presumably already know that that release is going to be desupported this year in October, and your upgrades to Discoverer 10g are already underway.

At least I hope you know about Discoverer 4i’s impending desupport status.