How can I use original account when booting Cygwin from USB Drive?

Question

I put Cygwin on a USB drive because I wanted to be able to use it on other computers. But when I tried to launch the shortcut it created a new user account with the username of the local computer. I want to be able to use my original account that I setup. I tried the "login" command but it rejects my password (empty) every time. I tried "ssh username@localhost" but the connection is always refused.

I just want to be able to easily port Cygwin and use my original account.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Cygwin is designed to be installed on one system. There used to be a Cygwin Portable project but it has been abandoned and the maintainer now suggests that interested users search for "Cygwin Portable" on GitHub.com.

Answer 2

Cygwin is using the same windows account of the current windows user.

https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html

As the a windows account of the other computer is unknown in the new system you can not have it.

As workaround you can try to set
/etc/passwd
with multiple SSID rows with the same cygwin user alias, but I don't expect it will work perfectly for all application.