Notes on Cygwin/ eCos installation :

Cygwin is a linux emulation environment for windows, please remember it is NOT Linux, so programs that you have compiled in GCC under Linux will have to be recomplied in Cygwin and so on.

Why use Cygwin?
Easy, you may choose to build and run eCos toolchain in Linux, not a problem, but other than that most of your other software tools like the flash programmer, BDM interface+Debugger frontend software are windows supported. Working on two different platforms can be tedious at best. With Cygwin you can use eCos toolchain, complile your codes in GCC, program the binaries onto microcontroller flash memory and debug, all on a single platform, makes sense?

What you need to do:

1. Download Cygwin setup file from here, follow the instructions. As on today the latest Cygwin 1.5.20 works fine with eCos (read configtool), Cygwin-1.5.19 had some issues and eCos users were advised to fall back to the older Cygwin-1.5.18-1.
Please note, 'wget' and 'Tcl' tools are needed for eCos installation, these two are not installed with default Cygwin configuration. You will have to enable installation of 'wget' and 'Tcl' when package selection window shows up during Cygwin installation. 'wget' is found under 'emulators' and 'TCl' 'scripts'.

2. Easiest way to install eCos toolchain is to follow installation instructions at ecos.sourceware.org, execute the two commands given, rest is menu driven. You'll be presented with option to select gnutools, for our purpose 'powerpc-eabi' would suffice, since FCC is MPC555 based.

3. Once eCos toolchain is installed, download latest snapshot of configtool from here. Replace the default configtool file found in ecos-2.0/tools/bin/ folder with this one.

4. Download eCos package repository which contains the working Phytec PhyCore555 port here. Delete the entire contents of ../ecos-2.0/packages/*.* and replace with the contents of repository you just downloaded.

5. All set. Run configtool.exe from cygwin terminal. You should now see the eCos configtool GUI pop-up on your screen. Thats it!