I'd thought I mention that this has been done before, by both myself and Matthew Donald. Both done in the time before the option to install X via setup.exe.
My versions are available at http://www.webone.com.au/~rasjidw/WinXTerm-0.32.zip http://www.webone.com.au/~rasjidw/WinXTerm-0.4-Test53.zip with the original website for the project at http://lasp.sourceforge.net/winxterm/. Both of my versions are *very* outdated now, as I had put the project on hold until such time as X was installable via setup.exe. I had essentially decided to take Robert's approach, but have had no time over the last few months now the setup.exe option is available. The main reason I decided to go with the setup.exe option is due to the 'you can't have two versions of cygwin.dll running at the same time' problem. And in fact you can use setup.exe and still only have a 5-6 MB download (assuming you don't install fonts etc and don't actually want anything more than X and bash to work or be available). Doland's project is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/winfree86/, as was also delphi based. I don't think he has done anything on it since January, although I have not had any recent contact with him. Strangely enough, I was planning to start work on project again this month, and perhaps even this weekend, with my first step being to do the script to configure XDMCP access on a 'standard' linux distribution. My planned second step was to then create a 'wizard' that would only download the components you need (much less than even a base level cygwin install) and then use setup.exe to install them. Unfortunately I don't know C or C++, and so was planning to do the install wizard in either python and wxWindows or Java and Swing. If someone want to do a 'native' windows version, that would be fine by me. I'd be more than happy just to play bug-tester etc. Once I got this far, I was going to talk to Robert about possible ways to enable 'non-cygwin packaged' programs to talk to and utilise setup.exe. I have noticed that a number of open source Linux/Unix programs have their windows version using the cygwin dll, but don't use setup.exe. It only takes two of these programs to be using sufficiently different versions of the cygwin dll for things to start breaking. This worries me quite a bit, as what will happen is that people will simply say 'Oh damn, this open source product is buggy. I'll go back to using closed source software, it works better.' For example, MySQL use the cygwin dll for their windows port (see http://www.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-3.23.html) but they are using cygwin 1.3.9 not the current version. This could cause problems in the future if someone does not keep their mysql setup up to date but also uses Cygwin and does keep it up to date (or vice-versa). Because of the above, I think it is important to have a XDMCP only version of Cgywin-XFree86 that does sit within the setup.exe framework. If no-one else does this version, then I will, but I can't guarantee exactly when. If someone else is going to do it anyway, then I wont, as I have plenty of other things I can be doing. ;-) Anyway, enough of my ravings for the evening. It is late and I should be asleep. Cheers, Rasjid.