can't paste from Windows to X clients

[Jay Smith]

We were having a similar problem with Cygwin/xfree on Windows 95 with Linux 
running in Xwindows supplied via xfree/cygwin.

The problem had several aspects.

- When we "up" graded Cygwin at one point (can't remember which) things 
stopped working so we fell back.

- When we "up" graded our Red Hat 8 from Gnome to KDE, the cut/paste 
stopped working.  It was dead for a while until a KDE upgrade came along 
that included an upgrade to a package that caused things to work ... 
sometimes.  So there was a KDE problem -- but I don't recall what package 
it was (I think it had a Q in it).  However, we are current on KDE and 
things are working ... sometimes.

The final solution and to fix it so it works almost all the time was that:

--- We stopped using -clipboard.  Instead we run the standalone xwinclip 
after the cygwin was started.

--- When using the xwinclip, it would either fail quickly or fail to start 
at all or fail to restart if we used the windows "start" command.  Instead 
we simply run xwinclip.exe (without the "start" command) about 20 seconds 
after the cygwin is started.  It is best to wait until the linux desktop is 
up and settled in.

--- With that method, xwinclip will start and stay started about 80% of the 
time.  However, sometimes it won't start/restart or it will die during the 
day.  Attempts to restart it at that point often do not work immediately. 
The solution to that is to go into a simple windows program like Notepad, 
highlight some plain text and do ctrl-c.  Then try restarting xwinclip.exe 
-- it should work. Somehow it gets something in its craw that it does not 
know what to do with and it dies.

I know that some of my problems are probably because we are still using 
Win95 for desktops.  (We are holding out until linux gets good enough on 
the "corporate desktop" that we can switch to all-linux; soon I hope if the 
linux-heads would realize that they need to get serious about linux in the 
corporate environment before Joe Employee can be productive with.)

I also know that since I am not using the latest and greatest (?) Cygwin 
stuff, I can't whine about things not working.  However, I find the Cygwin 
upgrade process so darn obnoxious and time consuming with multiple download 
sites which may or may not work at any given moment and then you have to 
start over, blah, blah, blah.  I would be willing to PAY for a STABLE 
Cygwin upgrade/download method so that I did not have to play sysadmin to 
get the latest versions. (Someday hopefully the Cygwin folks will realize 
that not everybody likes to twiddle bits and that some people have to work 
at their jobs to make money instead of trying to figure out how to get 
stuff downloaded.)

Jay


Andrew Schulman said the following on 08/09/2004 03:42 PM:
> I run XWin.exe -multiwindow -clipboard -dpi 100 .  I can copy and paste from X 
> to Windows clients, but not from Windows to X clients.  Windows to Windows 
> and X to X copies also work fine.
> 
> I know I've seen postings about this problem in the past, but I can't find 
> anything recent about it and I don't know what the status is.  The problem 
> has persisted for me for a long time, on two different Windows XP boxes.
> 
> Any help appreciated.  cygcheck -svr is attached.
> Andrew.