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Re: Beginners questions.


> Subject: Beginners questions.
> Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 08:07:05 -0600
> From: Magus <magus1011ca@yahoo.ca>
> To: Cygwin-XFree Mailing List <cygwin-xfree@cygwin.com>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi All,
>
>   I think I've got Cygwin and XFree installed correctly on my
>   Win98 SE box. I type "think" because I have no standard to go
>   by. How can I tell when Cygwin is correctly installed? It
>   currently runs and I can access info, man, sh, bc and most
>   other good things that I know about.
>
>   I'm in the same position with the X window stuff. I have no
>   idea what I'm supposed to see. Since there are at least three
>   ways of starting X detailed in the FAQ/User Manual, I'd like to
>   try and tell you folks what I see when I try them and then you
>   can tell me if this is normal or not, OK?- --
> Best regards,
>  Magus

Hey, Magus,

I don't think there's a "normal" X window.  It depends
on what's in your ~/.xinitrc.  I copied it from /etc/X11/xinit.
This is one of the ways of starting up X, using the startx
command.  I found that I had to run startx from /usr/X11R6/bin.
Simply putting the directory into my path didn't work.

In ~/.xinitrc, twm starts the window manqager.  You will see 3
commands to start xterms, and 1 to start a clock.  That's
what you should get on your desktop.   The first thing I did
was replace all that stuff with stuff I normally start up on
the sun boxes (I use twm instead of the sun desktop).  That
varies from individual to individual.

The capabilities of twm are in the man page, but it's kind of
hard to read.  I would search for a tutorial on the web.  But
a bit of experimenation reveals pretty all there is (it's a
bare bones windows manager).  Most of the functionality
can be seen in the popup menus, which show up when you
click the mouse on the desktop, away from any windows.
Some xterm options menus can be seen by pressing
control-mouse-button in the xterm.

The good thing about twm is that it's easier than other
window managers to customize, since everything is in
the man page.  It's not light reading, and requires
experimentation, but probably way simpler than
customizing, say, Sun's CDE.

Good luck.  And hope it's an interesting experience,
exploring the vagaries of X, though it's admittedly not
always straightforward.

Fred

--
Fred Ma, fma@doe.carleton.ca
Carleton University, Dept. of Electronics
1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario
Canada, K1S 5B6




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