Various starting X problems

[Harold L Hunt II]

Luke,

luke.kendall@cisra.canon.com.au wrote:
> Now with the workaround of knowing to run startx -- :0 to get X to
> start, I thought I'd have a poke about to see what exactly makes it
> crash.  I came up with several interesting problems.
> 
> In my .xinitrc I *don't* have an explicit path for xterm.  However, I
> see xterm has moved from /usr/X11R6/bin to /usr/bin!  Did many other X
> applications also move into there?

My system does not have a problem finding xterm in /usr/bin because 
/usr/bin should always be in your Cygwin shell path... something else is 
wrong with your Cygwin setup if that is not the case.

> I only noticed that xterm had moved because when I start X with
> -multiwindow (or with -clipboard), it complains like this and exits:
> 
>     $ PATH="$PATH:/usr/X11R6/bin" startx -multiwindow -- :0

You shouldn't have to set the PATH to include /usr/X11R6/bin... as you 
said, it cannot find /usr/bin/xterm.

>     XCOMM: not found

Oops... that isn't supposed to be in the startx script.  Those XCOMMs 
are supposed to be replaced with # signs at the beginning of the line. 
I've fixed this in a new version of the script.

>     cat: /cygdrive/d/home/luke/.Xauthority: No such file or directory
>     xinit:  No such file or directory (errno 2):  no program named "/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm" in PATH

Something else must be wrong with your path.

> However if I start it the same way, but without the -multiwindow, X
> starts successfully. (PATH="$PATH:/usr/X11R6/bin" startx -- :0)
> 
> If I try to start it with a plain startx (no "--"), I get the usual
> illegal option messages (related to having some kind of "traditional"
> Chinese or Japanese font installed, I vaguely think), and then it dies
> because it thinks a window manager is already running:
> 
>     $  PATH="$PATH:/usr/X11R6/bin" startx             
>     cat: /cygdrive/d/home/luke/.Xauthority: No such file or directory
>     : illegal option -- t
>     : illegal option -- r
>     : illegal option -- a
>     : illegal option -- d
>     : illegal option -- i
>     : illegal option -- t
>     : illegal option -- i
>     : illegal option -- o
>     : illegal option -- n
>     : illegal option -- a
>     DISPLAY is :0
>     wmaker fatal error: it seems that there is already a window manager running
>     xinit:  Bad file descriptor (errno 9):  can't send HUP to process group 3904
> 
>     waiting for X server to shut down 

I think you have a custom ~/.xinitrc or your /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc has 
been modified.  Or, you might have ~/.xserverrc or 
/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc (which are not installed by anything I have 
written).  Please send in any of these files if you find them so that we 
can see what they are doing.  For starters, they are obviously starting 
a window manager, which is not something that the version from 
X-startup-scripts-1.0.5-1 does.

> So if I remove the "exec wmaker" from .xinitrc, X starts and stops
> instantly.  So I add an "xterm" at the end of .xinitrc (since X doesn't
> realise the wmaker would have started lots of windows from its saved
> workspace state if it had been given a few seconds to run).

Yeah, you have to have a "magic client" that is started with an exec at 
the end of your .xinitrc, otherwise the behavior that you described is 
exactly what is supposed to happen.

I think you can override the defaultserverargs in your .xinitrc so that 
you could have a .xinitrc that both starts its own wm and prevents 
startx from passing "-multiwindow" to XWin.exe.  I'm not an xinit/startx 
expert, so you'll have to look for docs on that elsewhere.

> It looks like no window manager is running at all.
> 
> I wonder how I can run multiwindow with wmaker as my window manager?
> Maybe keep the "exec wmaker" and set display to :1 ...  No, "startx
> -multiwindow -- :1" triggers the "no program named
> "/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm" in PATH" crash.  So I don't quite see how to
> achieve that.  I tried xinit -multiwindow but that started up a full
> desktop.

Seriously, the easiet way is to use startxwin.bat and modify it 
according to the instructions in that file.  Or, if you really want to 
start from a Cygwin shell, use startxwin.sh and modify it accorinding to 
its instructions.  There are pre-made lines that are just commented out 
that start a window manager etc.

Lets have you try these things first and see where it goes.

Harold