How to bootstrap the debian system for Windows32 / Cygwin.

(Or, how to install dpkg..)

Prequisites:

You will need to have cygwin installed (run the setup from this page: http://www.cygwin.com
You will need to be running Cygwin's telnetd/rlogind, instead of Microsft's telnetd. To install inetd under Windows 2000/XP, check out Adam Swann's HowTo install Inetd

You will need to have the ability to run processes as userid root, with a uid=0 and a gid=0. For more information on this, check out the Security section below.

Installing:

be root, (id should show 'uid=0(root) gid=0(root)')
If you want to keep cygwin's copy of md5sum, then you will need to save it off somewhere/how, since dpkg installs a copy of md5sum.

grab the dpkg-???_w32.nondebbin.tar.gz from http://debian-cygwin.sourceforge.net/bootstrap
unpack it into the appropriate directories.

copy /usr/bin/dpkg.exe, /usr/bin/dpkg-deb.exe, into some other directory that is called BEFORE /usr/bin. (This has to do with a limitation of Windows. You can't replace/rename/touch an already opened file.) I usually place mine in /sbin or /usr/sbin.

get the latest of dpkg_*_w32.deb from http://debian-cygwin.sourceforge.net/bootstrap and make sure it is located in a directory that is on a binary mounted volume

dpkg -i dpkg_*_w32.deb

If you get an error message "can't open /var/lib/dpkg/available", then do a
touch /var/lib/dpkg/available
touch /var/lib/dpkg/status
and rerun dpkg

delete /sbin/dpkg.exe, /sbin/dpkg-deb.exe
if you saved off cygwin's copy of md5sum, replace it now.

Security:

You must run dpkg as root, which means the userid and group need to be set to 0, and the name needs to = root.
You can accomplish this by manipulating your /etc/passwd and /etc/group files to change the administrator account to be root. Once you have done that, you have to either telnet or rlogin back to your machine and login as root.

for information on creating a root/superuser under cygwin, first read and understand the following:
http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html

Once you think you understand the document, then you should be able to create a root user. Here's what I did under my Win2K box:

mkpasswd -l > /etc/passwd
mkgroup -l > /etc/group
telnet and make sure that I can login as administrator, using administrator and >admin password<. If that doesn't work, go back to Prequisites, and get telnetd configured correctly.
vi /etc/passwd, and find the row for administrator. Change the name to root, uid to 0 and gid to 0.
Make sure that you update administrator, and that the SID for administrator is unique
vi /etc/group, find the row with SID = S-1-5-32-544. Change the name to root, and the gid to 0

Continuing Steps:

After you have dpkg installed, then other packages can be installed.
However, you will need to investigate dpkg's flags to allow for installing packages that have dependencies, but the cygwin equivalents are already installed (PERL comes to mind readily).
Also, you might need to override the architecture, since most packages are for i386(debian linux).

I am investigating how to create a proper debian archive structure to support w32 on this sourceforge site (in order to have the proper entry in /etc/apt/sources.list), but it's not there yet.