Windows 7 compatibility

[anzz1]

For anyone else looking to run this on Windows 7 / 8, the server has been broken since the release v2024-07-10 due to cygwin and updating from 3.4.9 to 3.5.3, the 3.5 line not supporting Windows 7 or 8 anymore.

more information

Luckily there is an easy fix, which is simply downgrading and replacing the cygwin1.dll with the latest version supporting Windows 7, that is 3.4.10.

Due to the version control of the cygwin operation with a massive understatement could be characterized as leaving much to be desired, it can be indeed a pain-in-the-arse trying to find correct versions of things, so here is the 3.4.10 cygwin1.dll attached.

tl;dr; Just drop in this cygwin1.dll and Windows 7/8 works again. Tested on the current latest 2025-03-10 release to work just fine.

cygwin1_3.4.10.zip

[fuzziqersoftware]

Since Microsoft has dropped support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, I'm not inclined to officially support them here either, but I'll link to this issue in the readme for others who might find this helpful.

[anzz1]

That's true, only Windows Server 2008 R2 is still officially supported but unofficially as they use the same kernel, you can use those same updates for Windows 7. Last update was pushed just 4 days ago in last Patch Tuesday, March 11, 2025—KB5053620 (Monthly Rollup). Support is currently ongoing until January 2026, but it remains to be seen if we'll get a "one more year" of support like has been happening right now.
If anything, I'd argue as Windows 7 has been feature-complete software for so long now, that it's more secure today than the later iterations, not less.

That's bit of a background though, I understand the decision and you absolutely don't need to keep supporting anything you don't want to, being open-source the Win7 users can support it ourselves.

Problem is coming from Cygwin's side anyway and not this release, there used to be an "easy" way to keep it's packages snapshotted to an earlier date, the Cygwin Time Machine, but something has happened there as the snapshots have stopped in 2022, and for Windows 7 the snapshot you'd want would be 2024/01/31, the day before the 3.5.0 release.