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Re: Can't start X after upgrading to cygwin1.7


On 23/01/2010 15:37, Jeff Spirko wrote:
On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 12:56 PM, Andrew Senior<aws@andrewsenior.com>  wrote:
I've had cygwin installed for a year on my Thinkpad T61, running
Windows XP professional, and just ran the latest setup.exe from
cygwin.com.
I now can't run X with startxwin.exe (no process appears, no icon in
the system tray, clients won't start)
No /var/log/Xwin.0.log is written, nor anywhere else I can see in /var/log

I think the original poster had a broken installation, there's no other reason for it to get fixed by a reinstall :-)


I had the same symptoms.  Non-administrator WinXP users couldn't start
the XWin Server, and no /var/log/XWin.0.log was created.  The log file
could get created if there wasn't one already present, which led me to
put the log file in the user's directory instead of /var/log.  The
other problem was that users couldn't create the /tmp/.X0-lock file
and /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 socket if they were left by another user.  The
solution was to give each user their own /tmp directory.

I fixed it with the following:
1.  Added a line in /etc/profile, just before the "chmod 1777 /tmp" line:
      mount -f "$USERPROFILE/Local Settings/Temp" /tmp

2.  Changed the XWin Server icon so instead of just startxwin.exe, it says:
      ... "startxwin.exe -- -logfile ~/XWin.log"
(Don't take out the beginning of the command that runs startxwin
through bash, or the /etc/profile won't get run.  The quotes are
needed because this is the argument to bash's -c option.)

Could any of the guru's comment on how good or bad these solutions are?

Thanks. It's long been suspected that there is some problem with lockfiles running XWin as a non-administrator user (See FAQ 3.4,[1]), but I've never had a sufficient clear description to understand what the problem is, until now.


The only problem I see with your solution is that you are assuming only a single user is logged in. This might not be the case on a Terminal Server (although it would probably take a specific sequence of privileged/unprivileged logins and XWin startups/shutdowns to show a problem)

This would be better fixed in XWin itself by arranging to give these files the correct permissions, if we could work out how to do that :-)

[1] http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/cygwin-x-faq.html#q-cant-read-lock-file

--
Jon TURNEY
Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer

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