A carnival of technology

Do you use Cygwin? Do you ever get that error “fork: Resource temporarily unavailable” (EAGAIN) when trying to do something like compile a package? I finally tracked down the solution. The problem is that Windows doesn’t allocate enough memory for the process headers or something like that. There is a cygwin mailing list post linking to a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that explains how to make things go, reproduced here for the sake of hopefully making it easier to find.

• Find the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems\Windows
• See the value for “SharedSection”? There should be three numbers there.
  It doesn’t matter what they mean. Memory stuff.
• Double those three numbers.
• Reboot.

So far it WORKSFORME, and memory is cheap, so I can probably safely give more than 4KB to the desktop.