Re: XWin on taskbar

[Jon TURNEY <jon dot turney at dronecode dot org dot uk>]

On 01/08/2012 04:10, Eliot Moss wrote:
> On 7/31/2012 10:16 PM, Ross Boulet wrote:
>> I have a desktop running Windows 7 Professional and a laptop running Windows
>> 7 Home Premium. I have updated Cygwin on both to make sure everything is
>> current. I start X on both the same way using the shortcut installed by
>> Cygwin. On both machines, I have a .startxwinrc that starts two rxvt
>> windows. The difference is, on the desktop, items appear in the Windows
>> taskbar for the two rxvt windows only - as I expect. But on the laptop,
>> another taskbar item for the XWin server appears.
>>
>> It's not a huge deal, but it adds a little clutter to the taskbar I would
>> rather not see. Any thoughts as to why this is happening?
> 
> I am not sure the reason is known; a race condition has been
> mentioned as a possibility.  I solved this by using xlaunch,
> and starting that with cygwin's "run" program.

I strongly suspect this is a problem which only manifests itself on W7, as the
mechanisms which cygwin and run use to keep these console windows invisible
have to be different for W7.

I finally had a bit of time to try to reproduce this on W7, and succeeded in
seeing a problem, but I'm not sure if it's the same one as you are seeing:

If I have a non-empty ~/.startxwinrc, or no ~/.startxwinrc so startxwin starts
a default xterm, then I was seeing an additional taskbar item labelled "XWin
Server", but this taskbar item has no associated window, the only option in
the right-click menu is "close window".  When you close all the X programs
which have been started by startxwin, this taskbar item disappears.

Poking around a bit more, this taskbar item does seem be owned by the conhost
process which is associated with the xterm process started by startxwin.

Of course, if you try to debug this problem, it disappears, so this does look
like some kind of timing problem with the way we hide the console window.

I was able to get things to work properly by applying the attached patch to
run, although it's unclear to me that this is the correct fix or if this just
moves the problem around.

I've uploaded a build of run.exe at [1], perhaps you could try replacing
/usr/bin/run.exe with it and see if it improves things for you?

[1] ftp://cygwin.com/pub/cygwinx/run.exe

-- 
Jon TURNEY
Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer

Attachment: run.c.patch
Description: Text document

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