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Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2009 20:51:34 -0400
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please AT cygwin DOT com>
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Subject: Re: popup consoles on Windows 7
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On Sun, Jul 05, 2009 at 01:34:16AM +0100, Julio Costa wrote:
>On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 01:11, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> I checked this by removing the Windows 7 code from mintty and rebuilding
>> it. ??With the currently released version of Cygwin 1.7.0-50 this causes
>> a windows console to be displayed on the screen along with the expected
>> mintty window. ??With the 20090703 snapshot, which includes Corinna's
>> workaround, I got a flashing console. ??With the code in CVS I got the
>> expected behavior of no console flash.
>>
>
>Cool!
>But not so cool as if M$FT would correct their bugs :( booo!

Yeah, that's for sure.  I think I have a vague inkling as to why they
didn't just fix this problem.  I'll bet it has something to do with the
new conhost.exe program not understanding the windows station of the
process which started the console.  <broken record>I really can't
believe that they would release Windows 7 in such a broken state
though.</broken record>

>> As I type this I realize that I didn't really confirm that the new
>> invisible console code has the desired effect in mintty. ??It is supposed
>> to make some (native?) apps work better. ??I thought that one of the apps
>> was the "net" command and I don't have any problems running it but does
>> anyone remember a specific program (maybe even a cygwin program?) which
>> required the existence of a console to work correctly? ??If so, I'd like
>> to add it to the comments in the source code and verify that it still
>> works.
>>
>
>Remember old DOS days? EDIT.
>It even resizes my cmd window, so I bet it *must* have a strong reason
>to want a console.

I think that's probably one of those programs that won't work at all in
a Cygwin pty.  The invisible console code just helped a certain class of
application.  Apps which want to perform console operations on their
standard input and standard output still are not going to work any
better than they ever did.

I keep saying that I want to fix this and I recently found some public
domain code which purports to allow using consoles as "pipes".  I hope
I'll have time to look into adding this to Cygwin after 1.7 is released.

>> If you want to try a snapshot, make sure that you grab the new helper
>> app "cygwin-console-helper.exe" and put it in /bin. ??Without this,
>> you'll still see the same flashes as the 20090703 snapshot. ??The new
>> .exe file is in here:
>>
>> http://cygwin.com/snapshots/cygwin-inst-20090704.tar.bz2
>>
>
>Thanks for looking (hard) into this.

You have no idea how much time I wasted on this.

>I've no Win7 right now, but I already downloaded a copy, just because
>of these matters.  I'll try it during next week.

I've been running a copy of Windows 7 in Sun's virtualbox.  It really is
cool.  I have a vmware license but, lately, I've been using virtualbox
exclusively.

I know this is slightly off-topic but I can recommend this product for
virtually hosting Windows/Cygwin.  Personally, I really only want XP on
my hardware.  Everything else I run is in VirtualBox.  In fact, last
week, I copied my old NT4 partition from hardware to a virtualbox disk
and it booted up with minimal fuss.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

(Now I just have to copy the apparently defunct Windows 2000 partition
to virtualbox too)

cgf

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