Cygwin/X: KDE Desktop

[Maarten Hoes]

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 3:08 AM <briand@pounceofcats.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 13 May 2020 19:22:25 +0200
> Maarten Hoes via Cygwin <cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
>
> > >
> > > Now that you mentioned that, I seem to be having similar behavior as
> you:
> > > Xfce start every time I try it. But now that I tried it some more,
> LXDE is
> > > not consistent for me either. Sometimes I get a black screen,
> sometimes a
> > > black screen and the right-click-on-background-menu, and sometimes a
> normal
> > > working LXDE environment. The first time I try to start LXDE after a
> reboot
> > > of my PC seems to work always, and after that I get mostly the black
> screen
> > > without pop-up menu. The only thing I seem to be able to reproduce
> reliably
> > > with LXDE is the first try after reboot.
> > >
>
> I missed the start of this thread.
>
> the menu entries that you can find under the windows start menu work every
> once in a while, but the majority of the time they do like you say:
>
> 1 nothing
> 2 runs, but black screen
> 3 runs, and window manager comes up (very seldom)
>
> interestingly , running "startx" in mintty is 100% working.
>
> I am using the xfce desktop, and this all started on the last cygwin
> upgrade i did (which also broke graphics characters in terminals , although
> i'm sure the two are not related).
>
> hangs in cygwin are quite common in my experience, i know that a lot of
> the time it is due to stupid network drives in the PATH variable causing
> problems.  I have very carefully set-up my bashrc file to remove all the
> corporate network drives from the path.  that helped a lot.
>
>

Hi,


With 'current' Cygwin, Xfce is the only desktop that works all of the time
for me. It's the other ones that give the described problems, where GNOME
and KDE always give a black screen, and LXDE works 'sometimes' and others
it's the black screen. I only tried to start X11 from the commandline (I
think with 'startxwin' and not 'startx' but I'm not sure) with a 'exec
/usr/bin/startkde' in my .xinitrc to get a KDE desktop, but I had the same
result as with the icons in the MS-Windows start menu.

Currently, I have downgraded all of Cygwin to a release dated 2016/10/02,
and there both KDE and GNOME work as expected for me (although a bit
slowly). To do the 'downgrade', I used the 'Cygwin Time Machine', [1] which
archives past Cygwin 'snapshots' (read: all packages that were 'current' at
some given date in the past) to try out older Cygwin releases (with
packages that are meant to go together as defined by release date). I fully
realize this is by no means a 'supported' configuration, but it seemed like
a better option than randomly downgrading individual Cygwin packages
without knowing if they were meant to work together to begin with.


- Maarten


[1]
http://www.crouchingtigerhiddenfruitbat.org/Cygwin/timemachine.html