Re: Cut down xfree server for XDMCP only

[Tim Thomson <tim dot thomson at paradise dot net dot nz>]

On Sun, 2002-06-16 at 02:30, Rasjid Wilcox wrote:

> The main reason I decided to 
> go with the setup.exe option is due to the 'you can't have two versions of 
> cygwin.dll running at the same time' problem.  And in fact you can use 
> setup.exe and still only have a 5-6 MB download (assuming you don't install 
> fonts etc and don't actually want anything more than X and bash to work or be 
> available).

I had a play at doing this. Installing just the cygwin, zlib,
update-info-dir, and Xfree86-xserv packages brought the total size on
disk to just over 7Mb. The base cygwin package still has a lot of files
unneeded here, all we really want is cygwin1.dll. All we need in the
zlib package is cygz.dll, but there are a bunch of help files, .a files,
etc as well.
After culling the unneeded files, I got the total down to 3.7Mb. On top
of this we need to add a couple of fonts, and a few configuration files,
and any X libraries we wanted.

> Strangely enough, I was planning to start work on  project again this month, 
> and perhaps even this weekend, with my first step being to do the script to 
> configure XDMCP access on a 'standard' linux distribution.

Hehe, finding a "standard" linux distrib could be fun :)
Do you mean a script to enable an xdm type server for accepting remote
connections? This would be a great idea! Kind of tricky though, with
xdm, kdm, and gdm all doing this, but using different locations, and ach
distribution probably puts the config files in different locations as
well :)
I was looking at working on enabling esd sound for a user logging in
remotely.

> My planned second 
> step was to then create a 'wizard' that would only download the components 
> you need (much less than even a base level cygwin install) and then use 
> setup.exe to install them.  Unfortunately I don't know C or C++, and so was 
> planning to do the install wizard in either python and wxWindows or Java and 
> Swing.  If someone want to do a 'native' windows version, that would be fine 
> by me.  I'd be more than happy just to play bug-tester etc.

This would be nice, as a 'wizard' type install is what I'm wanting. It
doesn't help much in terms of size though, as there would be a lot of
redundant files still installed (for this application).

> Once I got this far, I was going to talk to Robert about possible ways to 
> enable 'non-cygwin packaged' programs to talk to and utilise setup.exe.  I 
> have noticed that a number of open source Linux/Unix programs have their 
> windows version using the cygwin dll, but don't use setup.exe.  It only takes 
> two of these programs to be using sufficiently different versions of the 
> cygwin dll for things to start breaking.  This worries me quite a bit, as 

This is a good idea. I was trying to work out a way of using the
/usr/local directories. If the initial install program couldn't find an
existing cygwin install, then it could use it's own version of the
cygwin libs. If it did find one, perhaps it could install everything
into the /usr/local directories? Or perhaps put itself in the standard X
locations, then create a package .lst file, etc. Is this enough though?

If it had done an install without cygwin, and then someone had installed
cygwin later, then the X launcher program could modify the path our XWin
binary got, so that it would use the new cygwin install. There would be
some issues here, maybe it would be better to give a warning that cygwin
had been installed, and that our package needed to be reinstalled?

Ideally I want to have it so that it inter-operates nicely with a cygwin
install, but can also install and function without cygwin, so there are
just the minimum required files needed, to reduce the overall size.

> Because of the above, I think it is important to have a XDMCP only version of 
> Cgywin-XFree86 that does sit within the setup.exe framework.  If no-one else 

I agree. I don't know if mine will do this entirely, as I would like to
offer a cut down cygwin as well as cut down xfree. Perhaps I could
release both, I will have to see how I go for time. I should get around
to packaging the launcher program for setup.exe. It is a GPL delphi app,
there is no problem doing this? I would install it to /usr/X11R6/bin ?
Can I get setup.exe to create an icon on the desktop or in the start
menu?

I won't get a chance to do much this week, I have exams until Saturday,
so will be rather busy :)

Cheers,

Tim.