problems with XFree

[gsroka at mmsa dot com]

(last email I sent complained about HTML MIME. i hope i'm not 
double-posting)

I started playing with XFree last week. It's been a few years since I've 
used UNIX, so you can call me a newbie, if you like. I'm running Windows 
2000 Pro on a P4 1.7 GHz with 768 MiB of RAM and 10 GB free on my hard 
drive. I (eventually) did a full Cygwin/XFree86 download and install 
(binaries, not source).

Please don't flame me if I'm out of line. I didn't know if I should break 
this up into several emails or have one big one. Also, please send 
responses to me by email.

Here are my obervations/problems.
Showstoppers:
1) The very first time I brought up the X server, I had modified 
startxwin.bat 
to use wmaker instead of twm. It crashed because /home 
hadn't been created yet. This was "fixed" by running the text-mode bash 
icon first.
2) when I run Xman, it says "No App-Defaults File". If I run "Xman -notop" 

instead, I can browse one man page, and then it stops working. (it gives a 

"likeToSave" message box with yes and no buttons that don't seem to do 
anything.) It seems to be related to missing a locale binary. Is there a 
way to get this to work? 
3) within the first few hours of usage, I ran a "find / -name abc -print" 
from the command-line, and my trusty Windows 2000 box restarted. no blue 
screen, no error. it was like someone pulled the power plug and plugged it 

back in. after it came up, i tried the same command and it worked fine.
4) i had a similar "restart" to #6 when I ran setup.exe while cygwin was 
up. of course, bad user, i should have stopped cygwin before running 
setup, but i'm still amazed at how easily my robust kernel, based on NT 
Technology, came down.

Nice-to-haves:
5) it'd be nice if setup.exe showed the size (in bytes or megabytes, etc.) 

of each package (it's in setup.ini). on my 56 Kb/s modem, downloading a 
large, unnecessary file takes a painfully long time, but a small 
unnecessary file is not so bad.
6) on that note, how about displaying those nice descriptions from 
setup.ini in setup.exe so we can see what the packages are before 
downloading them. a resizable window would come in handy for this.
7) the first time I downloaded (a partial download, not full), i picked 
"more" and "clear", but next time I went into setup.exe, it had 
"forgotten" that. perhaps if I can unrust my C, I can fix some of these 
bugs myself. give me a few weeks.
8) the XFree86-fnts package is 16 MiB. it's kind of big. the first time i 
downloaded from http:uiuc, it got 98% and stopped responding--1 hour 
wasted (at 56 Kb). the second time (no joke) it got 99% and 
stopped--another hour wasted. so i copied it from somewhere else.
9) my X clients on an AIX box didn't work because i didn't use the -kb 
switch on XWin. but i found that one on the faq. a possible enhancement to 

setup.exe?
10) using K (or Ki) and B for byte on setup.exe is always nice. make sure 
to leave a space between the number and the unit. 10 KB, not 10KB. how 
about estimated download time in addition to % ?
11) also, what's all that /b stuff about in startxwin.bat? gotos, etc. but 

there is no /b ! (there is no spoon either ;-)


Please no one take offense at all this. I'm not trying to throw blame. It 
seems like a great product, so far (except for the deadly restarts). These 

are perhaps suggestions for doing it better. I know some coworkers who 
tried to get this to work, but gave up because of the problems. So will 
the average newbie or the busy IT pro who doesn't have time to read lots 
of faqs and will buy Exceed instead. I hope my observations will help 
others.

Gabriel Sroka
gsroka at mmsa dot com