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I’ve just managed to get Django up and running on Cygwin.

I have to say that getting PIL to build was a real pain in the neck (Python Imaging Library - required for ImageField). In the hope that I may save others from this pain, here is the solution.

You need to compile PIL from source so make sure you have gcc installed (in cygwin). There’s a handy installation helper in the cygwin setup package list called, ‘gcc: C compiler upgrade helper’. Install this, and it grabs the dependencies.

PIL Python Imaging Library

Get the PIL source from here, and unpack the archive to your sources folder (I use /home/rich/sources).

Now, if you run python setup.py install, the installation hangs (for me anyway). Googling reveals that this is not uncommon. What you need to do is ‘rebase’! Sound like a crack issue… maybe it is?

Here’s the magic command (and don’t ask me why this works):

rebase -b 0x1000000000 /bin/tk84.dll

So, close cygwin and open up task manager, kill any gcc.exe or python.exe processes that are hanging around. Next, run the above command. You should then be able to install using setup.py as normal.

python setup.py install

A big thank you to Ross Patterson for publicising this solution.

Installing PIL on Cygwin was published on Jetfar.com.