Re: TWM menus don't start xterms (long reply)

[Kirsty Hollingworth <keh112 at york dot ac dot uk>]

Thank-you so much for all your help.  I have put in this email just about
everything I can think of that might be worth you knowing.  

On 3 Jun 2002, Andrew Markebo wrote:

> / Kirsty Hollingworth <keh112@york.ac.uk> wrote:
> | I don't seem to have a /tmp/Xwin.log - is it hiding somewhere else or has
> | nothing gone wrong (unlikely)
> 
> c:\cygdrive\tmp\Xwin.log? 
> 
> This should be created!

It is not there - I tried creating an empty file called Xwin.log and it
has ignored it.  At startup I noticed that Xwin complains that /tmp should
be owned by root.  As my passwd file only contains an entry for myself
chown fails.

 > 
> Hmm is it so bad that it is not even the cygwin x-server firing up or
> similar?? Send me a screendump of the cygwin xfree-window how far it
> has come.. 
> 
> *remind me* did you use the latest stuff, do you have other x-servers?
>  Rational Rose?
> 

I installed cygwin/xfree in October and updated in December.  It is rather
difficult to update which is why it has been done infreqently (download to
zip disk, zip disk to linux box, ftp across house network).  It fires up
fine and I have slightly modified the startxwin.bat to fire up a telnet to
our linux box and a copy of xclock as well as the default xterm.  The
local xterm starts iconified as my usual use for X is as a display for
apps on the linux box.  The linux box does not run XDCMP and cygwin was
installed on a virtually clean Win95 installation.  If it does make a
difference I required use of Octave which ignored my cygwin and installed
its own, in the meantime messing up my cygwin settings (reset cygwinroot). 
Running the cygwin setup seemed to fix this - however the problem has been
around before this, however I was too busy with work to attempt to fix it
and put up with closing Xwin down and restarting it if I accidently killed
my console window.  THings run from this locally appear correctly.  
I usually (but not always) have windows cdplayer playing a cd.

A quick list of what I have installed (off the top of my head):
Norton Antivirus 2001 (from Norton SystemWorks)
R (statistics package)
Cygwin/Xfree
Octave(currently disabled)
Gnuplot (came with Octave)
SPSS (statisics package)
MS Excel and Powerpoint 97/2000 viewers
Standard bundled MS stuff
Some random things for burning CD's on my CD burner
Winzip 8.0 (unregistered)
Acrobat (4 or 5 can't remember)
I possibly have a windows version of Ghostview.


I am going to have to update my installation soon as I need a local
version of LaTeX - when I do, do you think it is worth trying another
window manager?  As I mentioned to someone I quite like WindowMaker and
was thinking of installing that but if the problem is not with twm I want
to sort one problem first before I introduce ten more!

As I said at the top thank you very much for helping me.
--
Kirsty Hollingworth                               <keh112@york.ac.uk> 
"The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, 
 but that men will begin to think like computers."   Sydney J. Harris