Automatic X server startup

[Matt D.]

I know this thread is a bit old now but I just wanted to mention my 
solution. I've added X to start in a separate "screen" in my 
.bash_profile. That way every time I log into Cygwin, X is always available.

It's kind of like the previous suggestion of adding it to Windows 
startup, but I have it more closely coupled to Cygwin.


Matt D.

On 6/2/2014 9:57 AM, Jon TURNEY wrote:
> On 28/05/2014 13:57, Pavel Fedin wrote:
>>> I believe this is arranged using launchd on OS X, which listens on the
>>> socket the X server will use, and starts the X server when something
>>> connects.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, there is no similar system facility on Windows.
>>
>>   But it should be possible to make xlib a little bit more smart,
>> isn't it ? It could automatically run X server when a connection is
>> attempted but refused. So we would achieve the same effect as on MacOS.
>>   We could e. g. have some directory like /etc/X11/autostart, to be
>> examined by xlib. If it detects that e. g. :0 screen is not
>> accessible, it would attempt to look up 0.xlaunch file there and run
>> "xlaunch -run /etc/X11/autostart/0.xlaunch" command.
>>   What do you think ? I could implement this idea if you have no time
>> to work on that, i believe it should be very easy.
>
> Patches are always welcome, so please feel free to work on this if you
> like.
>
> I have my doubts that that it's straightforward to add this in libX11 in
> a way that is generally useful (for e.g.: there would be a race
> condition if two processes both try to start the server at the same
> time, there's much room for confusion about how to specify the X server
> options to be used, if it could be started explicitly for the start
> menu, or implicitly by libX11,...)
>
>>> You can achieve a somewhat similar effect by copying the X server
>>> shortcut to the startup group to start it automatically at login, at
>>> the cost of slowing down system startup somewhat.
>>
>>   Heh, it's already slow because of antivirus and other corporate
>> stuff (i cannot disable it). Running on demand would be better.
>
> You might consider looking at starting it from launchd or perhaps xinitd
> if possible, and then just that can be started by the X server shortcut,
> or at startup.
>

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