There are actually two versions of Hercules on Windows. Originally Hercules on Windows required Cygwin. Around version 3.03, a native Windows version version (also called the MSVC version for Microsoft Visual C++, the compiler used) was released. The two versions are functionally equivalent. Generally most new Hercules users will want to use the MSVC build because it's easier to to install and does not depend on Cygwin. The Cygwin version works well for people who already use Cygwin or who want to use Hercules in a Unix-like environment on Windows.
This section shows how to install the MSVC version of Hercules on Windows.
The latest version of Hercules can be downloaded at the offical Hercules web site. Select one of the Windows native builds. Most NT-based versions of Windows will run the Windows installer package. MSI installers are also easier to automate and deploy in a large environment, for example if you wanted to deploy Hercules in a computer lab.
Installing Hercules on Windows is just like installing any other software package. By default it will put the program in C:\Program Files\hercules-(version) and create a shortcut in the Start menu to launch a Hercules shell with the environment variables set (very handy). From here you can navigate into your MVS directory and start MVS. If you would like a more user friendly way to use Hercules on Windows, Fish, one of the main MSVC porters, has a tool called HercGUI which provides a graphical interface for Hercules and many of the tools that come with it.
The SVN snapshots are not tested as thoroughly as the release versions and bugs may show up from time to time. Use at your own risk.
That said, I have been using the SVN code for years and have only had a few minor issues.
From time to time a new feature or bug fix is announced on the Hercules mailing list, but the official releases are updated less frequently than features are added. Ivan Warren maintains a site that has the cutting edge, latest Hercules builds based on the source code tree in its present state.
The latest builds are available here.
If you have the release version installed using the steps above, you can just replace the files in C:\Program Files\hercules-(version) with the files from the ZIP file. Otherwise you can extract it wherever you see fit.
Download the latest RPM (available for i686 or x86_64), and type rpm -ivh hercules-3.07-1.i686.rpm or rpm -ivh hercules-3.07-1.x86_64.rpm as root.
You will need a few tools, libraries, and headers to build Hercules from source on Linux. Since I use Ubuntu Linux on my machine, the package names reference will refer to packages in the Ubuntu repositories, but as long as your distribution has equivalent packages the same process should work.
tim@ubuntu:~$ svn co svn://svn.hercules-390.org/hercules/trunk hercules
A hercules/hostinfo.h
A hercules/ltdl.c
A hercules/ltdl.h
A hercules/sllib.c
...
A hercules/README.OSX
A hercules/crypto.h
A hercules/hostinfo.c
U hercules
Checked out revision 5273.
tim@ubuntu:~$ cd hercules
tim@ubuntu::~/hercules$ sh autogen.sh
Note: if you do not see a 'All processing sucessfully completed.'
message when this script completes, then something went wrong and
you should examine the output to try and determine what it was that
went wrong.
aclocal... OK. (25% done)
autoheader... OK. (50% done)
automake... OK. (75% done)
autoconf... OK. (100% done)
All processing sucessfully completed.
You may now run ./configure in order to create a custom Makefile
that is suitable for your platform and environment.
tim@ubuntu:~$/hercules ./configure
<configure output>
tim@ubuntu:~/hercules$ make
<make output>
tim@ubuntu:~/hercules$ sudo make install
Password: <enter your Linux password>
<more make output>
At this point the Hercules binaries are installed and ready to run. If you want to remove the duplicate binaries, you can type make clean or you can simply delete the entire hercules folder with source code since it is no longer needed.