[PLUG] cygwin (win32/free) X servers / Debian GNU/Win32 ?

[darxus@chaosreigns.com]

Cygnus Win32 (cygwin - http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin) is something
I'm sure I've mentinoed to people on this list before.  And I mentioned it
wednesday at the plug meeting.

Cygwin is the opposite of WINE.  It is an implimentation of the linux libs
under windows.  You can download a source tarball, extract it, run make,
and get a binary that will run under windows.  And since we have the
source to the entire environment we're emulating (linux), it's lots more
stable and functional than wine.

If you do the full install of cygwin, you get 24mb of gzipped gnu
utilities.

This stuff can be extreemly useful, giving you the power of unix utilities
when you're trapped in a windows environment.

One of the problems this project has faced was the lack of a free X server
for the win32 platform.  Porting XFree86 was a problem because of the way
the hardware was accessed.

That problem has recently been fixed.  There are now apparently 3.  One is
based on VNC, one is built on DirectX (both GPLed), and the other is a
port of XFree86.  I made sure I could get one of them to work before
writing this post (it happened to be the DirectX one).

I'm rather excited about this.  Now just about any gnu app can be ported
to, and run on, win32.

It has renewed my desire for an entire Debian port... "Debian GNU/Win32" ?

Yes, I know "that's just wrong".  But it would rock.


I don't know how much I would be able to put into the project though,
since the only windows box that I currently use regularly I am going to be
installing Linux as the primary operating system on relatively soon.  But
my rather strong desire to see the port happen could result in a fair
amount of effort from me.  I really want to see dpkg & apt ported.

This post might have been more appropriate for the PADS/NADS mailing
lists, but I believe everyone on both of those is here, and there are more
here who might be interested.

There are mailing lists (including one dedicated to the xfree port) at the
url mentioned above.

Below are my experiences with one of the cygwin X servers.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2000 13:36:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: darxus@chaosreigns.com
To: ssiddiqi@inspirepharm.com
Subject: how I got an X server & xterm to run under cygwin


This is what I'd like to send to the cygwin-xfree list, but I haven't been
able to subscribe.


The process of getting an X server to run under cygwin was painful.  I
thought I'd tell the rest of you what I ended up doing that worked.


1) Download
ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/sourceware/cygwin/latest/setup.exe and save
it to a temporary folder.

2) execute setup.exe

3) tell it you want the root directory to be c:\ (must be \)

4) tell it you want to install from the internet (i)

5) select a mirror (I suggest #24, ftp.freesoftware.com) -- it'll take a
while to download & install 24mb of .tgz's.

(cygwin is now installed)

6) Download
ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/sourceware/cygwin/xfree/contrib/X-servers-v-1.0.tar.bz2
and save it to a temporary folder.

7) Open a dos shell

8) execute these commands:

\bin\cygwin
umount /usr/lib
umount /usr/bin
exit

9) cd to the directory containing X-servers-v-1.0.tar.bz2

10) execute these commands:

\bin\bunzip2 X-servers-v1.0.tar.bz2
cd \

11) Assuming you downloaded the X-servers file to
c:\dl\X-servers-v-1.0.tar.bz2, run "\bin\tar -xvf /dl/cygwin/X-serv*"


12) in bash, umount 2 directories

13) rename c:\bin\cygwin1.dll cygwin1.bak

13) run c:\usr\bin\X11\startdx


Notes: 

1) If you don't do the umounts, the X server stuff will be put in the
wrong place.  Why were those mount points set up that way ?  error is
"Couldn't open RGB_DB '/usr/lib/X11/rgb'".  

2) If you don't rename \bin\cygwin1.dll, xterm won't load -- error is like
"*** shared region is corrupted.  inited 15 0 [main] ? 0
lock_pinfo_for_update: rc 0, pinfo_mutex 0xFFFFFFFF, Win32 error 6" (even
if you load it from the batch file).  What's up with these conflicting
libs ?

3) I haven't gotten to testing how much stuff I broke in the process of
making the X server & xterm work.  When they load, I get the error
message:

Warning: locale not supported by C library, locale unchanged
Warning: locale not supported by Xlib, locale set to C
Warning: X locale modifiers not supported, using default
Failed to open input method

..and it looks like twm's behavior/color properties aren't loaded.

5) The machine I'm using is running windows 98.


I am extreemly happy to finally see X servers available for cygwin.  Now I
can't wait for Debian GNU/Win32 :)

___________________
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