Some Questions

[Rodrigo Medina <rmedina at ivic dot ve>]

Hi!

I am a new user of Cygwin/XFree86. It is great to have all the power of unix
at home without fighting with the rest of the family because I have substituted
Windows by Linux!. Thanks to all the people involved in this project. I have
some questions and reports of extrange behavior.

First, my system is 686 ; Windows 95a. cygwin.dll 1.3.9-1 (last update
2002/02/07) , XFree86 is of Jan 2002. I am using twm.

1)Good news:
 Some time ago I reported that if in .xinitrc I put 2 or 3 of xterms
followed by twm there was a confusion and many times the bash shells
were assigned to the wrong xterms and/or did no appear at all (in ps
they appear assigned to no terminal). This extrange behavior apparently
disappeared after I updated cygwin.dll (my previous one was of Dec 2001).

2)Bad news: After updating cygwin.dll, .xinitrc stop working because
xmodmap did not recognize "!" as a comment character in the .Xmodmap
file. This behavior of xmodmap appeared only inside the .xinitrc shell
script (or any other shell script). I reported this to the cygwin mailing
list. Someone told me to try
bash instead of sh in the script and indeed it worked fine. What I then
did was to replace /bin/sh.exe with a link sh.exe->bash.exe. Is this extrage
behavior of sh "normal"? Can the change I performed produce any kind
of problems?

3)While compiling ghostview I got a message from gcc complaining that
the type of sys_errlist was different in sys/errno.h and in /X11/Xos.h
(also inside some internal files of ghostview). 

In errno.h:
#ifdef __CYGWIN__
extern __IMPORT const char * const sys_errlist[};

In Xos.h:
extern char *sys_errlist[];

I am not an expert of gcc, but it seems to me that the second "const"
in errno.h is wrong. I did the following changes:

In errno.h:
extern __IMPORT const char * sys_errlist[];
In Xos.h:
extern const char *sys_errlist[];

With these changes ghostview compiled. Did I do the right thing?

4) Most of the times the Cygwin+XFree SERVER fails to process some
particular actions related to the mouse buttons. I have seen this in
in xterm, where the CTRL-MouseButton menus usually do not appear (the
bell rings). Also in ghostview there are some menu buttons (File, etc..)
that usually do not function. I say usually because occasionally they do
function correctly. I have no idea of when or why this happens. I do
know that the problem is due to the server and not to the client
programs because: i) the same programs behave correctly using the
commertial X-WinPro server running locally, ii) a xterm, that I know is
fine, running remotely from a SunOS machine presents the same problem.
  Have other people observed similar behavior, or it is happening only to me?
  Has anybody any idea of what is going on?

Thanks in advance

Rodrigo Medina
Centro de Fisica IVIC
rmedina@ivic.ve
Subject: Some questions