cygin 3.6.2-1 under Win11 24H2: Cannot launch: no available terminals

[Andrey Repin]

Greetings, Robert Fensterman!

> When I try to launch Cygwin 3.6.2-1 - be it from the taskbar shortcut,
> double-clicking on mintty.exe, or running mintty.exe from CMD - I get an
> error message:

>> Error: Could not fork child process: There are no available terminals (-1)

> The resulting window is titled "-nologin".

What's your /etc/shells and what is the output of `getent passwd %USERNAME%` ?
Can you start bash.exe directly?

> The taskbar shortcut is:
>> C:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe -i /Cygwin-Terminal.ico -

> I ran setup this morning to update whatever had updates; this included the
> base cygwin package. As last week, it warned me that there was a point
> update; I've since downloaded that and re-run setup (without reverting
> anything; just letting it do its normal cleanup) to no avail. I've attached
> the portion of setup.log with those two runs.

> I did also update several other Windows apps Windows first thing this
> morning, before I'd tried to open a Cygwin terminal; I don't recall that
> list including anything that should have affected terminals, but I suppose
> it's possible.

> Google searches suggest killing several programs (ssh, ssh-agent, bash, sh,
> git, node etc.); none are running. I have tried rebooting a couple of
> times, launching Cygwin (from the taskbar shortcut) as soon as I can after
> reboot, and I still get the error.

> Other terminal-ey apps work: git-bash launches and appears to work
> normally; similarly, CMD and PowerShell both seem to be just fine.

> Reverting to v 3.6.1-1 seems to work: Cygwin launches and is acting
> normally. Updating cygwin through the current version of setup results in
> the same error condition (and, reverting a second time is still working).

> Running on Win11 24H2 (OS Build 26100.4061).



-- 
With best regards,
Andrey Repin
Wednesday, May 28, 2025 13:20:56

Sorry for my terrible english...