RE: problems with XFree

["Dennis Foreman" <dforeman at stny dot rr dot com>]

I too have had problems. I have discovered differences in the parameters for
xterm between Xfree and my SunOS system. Some Xfree parameters are deemed
invalid on SunOS.  Some SunOS parameters don't exist in xterm. Some don't
work the same way, and some don't work on the cygwin as described in
cygwin's man pages (if I read the man pages correctly, -sb for instance is
supposed to take an integer argument, but doesn't). Also, when I get an
xfree error in cygwin, it says to type "xfree -help". Doing so produces an
error.

regards,
D. J. Foreman
website: http://WWW.CS.Binghamton.EDU/~foreman

-----Original Message-----
From: cygwin-xfree-owner@cygwin.com
[mailto:cygwin-xfree-owner@cygwin.com]On Behalf Of gsroka@mmsa.com
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2002 3:16 PM
To: cygwin-xfree@cygwin.com
Subject: problems with XFree


(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