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 -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/