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Subject: Installation issues (newbie)
Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:43:02 -0700
Message-ID: <1151EBFEB760994A96A622B835374E0F138459@PA-ECLUSTER1.vmware.com>
From: "David Masterson" <dmasterson AT vmware DOT com>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
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I used to use Cygwin a long time ago and am now coming back to it.

My setup:

*	Dell Precision Workstation 370
*	MS-Windows XP Pro v5.1.2600

Step 1: Install Cygwin

*	I used setup.exe to first download all of Cygwin to my local hard
drive.  I do this so that, if I install it a few times, I don't have to hit
the Internet after the first time.  Somewhat faster.
*	After downloading everything, I used setup.exe to install the
Default.  A couple of times, this gave me errors in the postinstall steps
about some DLL, but it didn't repeat consistently, so...
*	After I installed, I brought up Bash and got the usual message about
/etc/passwd & /etc/group.  I used mkpasswd and mkgroup to fill them in.
*	"Default" (I believe) doesn't install MAN pages or editors, so
figuring out what mkpasswd/mkgroup did and/or adjusting it is kind of
difficult.  This should be fixed or documented better.

Step 2: Get an X server working

*	"Default" doesn't install any X, so I reran setup.exe to do an "All"
install (I have room).  This got me a "Cygwin/X" menu in the Start menu list,
but didn't provide any obvious way of starting an X server.
*	Suggestion: Have setup.exe add an icon for "startxwin.bat" to the
Desktop.  I manually did that.
*	Double-clicking startxwin.bat brings up an X server and xterm with
the root window hidden.  Xclock also seems to work properly.

Step 3: Get an editor running

*	Starting "emacs" from the xterm window brings up emacs, but it
immediately crashes when you try to do anything in it.
*	Starting "xemacs" from the xterm window seems a little better as you
can do things in it, but it crashes when you try to exit from XEmacs.
*	I then did an "xhost +" to disable access control.
*	Running "emacs" from an RHEL3 system with the display pointed at my
Cygwin system brought up a window, but immediately crashed.
*	Running "xemacs" from the RHEL3 system with the display pointed to my
Cygwin system worked much better and seemed normal (most times!).  I tested
this a few times and XEmacs did crash once.

So what's wrong with the X server in Cygwin?  Since I'm just getting going, I
posted this to the cygwin mailing list -- later I may move to the
cygwin-xfree mailing list.

David Masterson


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