I just discovered a nice program called CygWin that in effect installs a linux/unix emulator on a Windows computer. This allows you to open a true linux/unix command window from your windows desktop, and use linux/unix tools and applications, including the X-windows gui! I haven't had th time to fully explore what it provides, but I will be exploring it for the next week or so!

To install it, expect to spend some time online, downloading. First, at the website for cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com), download the setup.exe program to a folder where you want to put the install files. I used C:\temp\cygwin for this. Then you run the setup.exe program - choose install from the internet, then tell it where to put the installed files - maybe C:\cygwin, it then asks where to put the files it downloads - this is a temp folder, so put it in c:\temp\cygwin again.

Then select an ftp source from the list it provides, hopefully you will find one that works. Once the list of packages comes up, if you click on the 'default' at the very top, all of them will change to 'install' - note that this installs EVERYTHING, and will download about 110mb to create a 250mb installation. Takes time and storage space!

But once it finishes, you will have a very nice linux shell!