Using only the X server of Cygwin

[Charles Wilson]

Hey, Nicholas -- don't squish Rhialto that quickly.  He's probably one 
of our new users who knows nothing about the cygwin project except what 
he read on slashdot this morning.

The fact is, Rhialto, we focus on cygwin -- as an environment all by 
itself, *and* independent of any specific intended use or resource 
availability(*).  You have a specific setup, where you want to leverage 
you existing resources (e.g. a local linux-based font server) to avoid 
downloading extra stuff.

You are an advanced (linux) user, with a very specific purpose in mind. 
  That's not the target of the cygwin (or cygwin-xfree) project.  It 
*IS* possible to do what you want -- but there isn't a super-simple 
one-click path to do it.  [Think about user interface design: there can 
only be a limited number of 'easy' [one-click, two-click] 
configurations.  We use those for the "normal" users -- folks who want 
the cygwin environment, not folks who want JUST 'Xwin -broadcast' and 
nothing else -- or JUST ssh and nothing else).

However, it SHOULD be possible -- and checking the ml archives on this 
will help -- to create a custom 'setup.ini' script or pseudo-package 
that setup.exe can read, to install ONLY what you want -- but this will 
take a little work on your part.  Again, check the archives.

The basic thing is, setup is configured to install the 'Base' package by 
default (think Debian's 'base' category).  Base is about 50Meg unpacked 
I think.  Then, on top of that, there are certain things that the xserv 
program itself needs -- like libpng's DLL, zlib's DLL, etc.

> And it downloaded a
> lot more which it apparently did not even install, such as bash, diff,
> diffutils, fileutils, etc.


These are all part of the 'Base' category.  If you explicitly 
de-selected specific items -- even if they are in the 'Base' category -- 
then setup shouldn't even download them.  There may be a bug in 
setup.exe's handling of the Base category.  Sorry about that.


(*) that is, cygwin-xfree should work OOB on a standalong machine 
without any external font server, at least by default.  Do we really 
want a windows newbie to understand "oh, I also need to install the 
fonts".  Of course not -- we do that by default IF the user installs X. 
  [Linux distros do this too, you know -- if you install XFree86 on Red 
Hat, you *will* get the fonts.]

--Chuck