Good alternatives to Cygwin? - Cygwin doesn't support natively support Win32 apps

Question

Update 1/9/2014: TL;DR version: Go to bottom of this post for a way to get Cygwin to be able to call non-Cygwin programs.

After having spent the ti

Answer 1

The best alternative I found is Gow (Gnu On Windows).

It's a lightweight alternative to Cygwin, about 10 times lighter. As far as I know the 130 tools installed with Gow are regular Win32 applications.