In Microsoft Windows, most people run programs by pulling down menus or by clicking on icons that have been carefully placed there by install programs. Thus the idea of a
path along which to search for programs (such as a browser) is no longer useful in Windows.
On my computer the browser program
firefox.exe is in the following directory.
c:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox
But M2 is a Cygwin program, and it lives in a different world, where paths to files don't ever start out with something like
c:. In that world, that directory is known instead as:
/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox
Conversely, the root directory known in the Cygwin world as
/ could be located anywhere in the Windows world. On my machine it is at
s:/cygwin
Use the
df command in a cygwin command shell window to determine that path: it is the file system on which
/ is mounted.
At least we can get back and forth between the two worlds.
Assuming you use a Bourne shell such as bash, you can edit your
.profile and add that directory to your PATH with a command like this:
export PATH="/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox":$PATH
Then M2 will be able to start firefox, but it will have trouble telling it where any files are. It may tell firefox to look at
/usr/share/doc/Macaulay2/Macaulay2/html/index.html
but firefox lives in the windows world and wants to be told to look at
s:/cygwin/usr/share/doc/Macaulay2/Macaulay2/html/index.html
instead. The same problem holds for the
index.html file in your directory
$HOME/.Macaulay2, because the absolute links there look like that, too.
For now the solution is to find your Cygwin files, start up firefox the usual way (from a menu), navigate to the appropriate version of
s:/cygwin/usr/share/doc/Macaulay2/Macaulay2/html/index.html
somehow and make a bookmark there.
It would be nice if there were a cygwin version of firefox, for then it and its file names would live in the cygwin world, and those absolute links would work. Perhaps there will be one soon, and I won't have to think about adjusting those links. We should probably just make the links relative, so that once you navigate to s:/cygwin/$HOME/.Macaulay2/index.html from the windows world and bookmark it, the links will work.