Cygwin/X on Windows 10 won't launch apps from .XWinrc menus

Roland Roberts roland@astrofoto.org
Tue Aug 10 12:58:50 GMT 2021


I have a new, company-supplied Windows 10 laptop, using Cygwin to do 
development. I’m having a problem getting XWin to launch apps. XWin 
appears to be mostly working normally, meaning if I launch a Cygwin 
mintty instance, I can manually set DISPLAY=:0.0 and start up X 
application from the shell prompt. But trying to launch from my .XWinrc, 
the application never displays and I can’t find a useful error log to 
track down the issue. I’m pretty sure it’s some permission someplace my 
account doesn’t have (and I can probably get IT to change that if I can 
just identify what it is).

Here’s the XWin.0.log

     Welcome to the XWin X Server

     Vendor: The Cygwin/X Project
     Release: 1.20.11.0
     OS: CYGWIN_NT-10.0-18363 CS-LT-RROB-02 3.1.4-340.x86_64 2020-02-19 
08:49 UTC x86_64
     OS: Windows 10  [Windows NT 10.0 build 18363] (Win64)
     Package: version 1.20.11-1 built 2021-04-27

     XWin was started with the following command line:

     /usr/bin/XWin :0 -multiwindow -auth
     /home/rrobert1/.serverauth.403

     ddxProcessArgument - Initializing default screens
     winInitializeScreenDefaults - primary monitor w 2560 h 1440
     winInitializeScreenDefaults - native DPI x 96 y 96
     [  1456.031] (II) xorg.conf is not supported
     [  1456.031] (II) See 
http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/cygwin-x-faq.html for more information
     [  1456.031] LoadPreferences: Loading /home/rrobert1/.XWinrc
     [  1456.031] LoadPreferences: Done parsing the configuration file...
     [  1456.031] winDetectSupportedEngines - RemoteSession: no
     [  1456.046] winDetectSupportedEngines - DirectDraw4 installed, 
allowing ShadowDDNL
     [  1456.062] winDetectSupportedEngines - Returning, supported 
engines 00000005
     [  1456.062] winSetEngine - Multi Window or Rootless => ShadowGDI
     [  1456.062] winScreenInit - Using Windows display depth of 32 bits 
per pixel
     [  1456.062] winAllocateFBShadowGDI - Creating DIB with width: 2560 
height: 1440 depth: 32
     [  1456.062] winFinishScreenInitFB - Masks: 00ff0000 0000ff00 000000ff
     [  1456.062] winInitVisualsShadowGDI - Masks 00ff0000 0000ff00 
000000ff BPRGB 8 d 24 bpp 32
     [  1456.078] MIT-SHM extension disabled due to lack of kernel support
     [  1456.078] XFree86-Bigfont extension local-client optimization 
disabled due to lack of shared memory support in the kernel
     [  1456.078] glWinSelectGLimplementation: Loaded 'cygnativeGLthunk.dll'
     [  1456.187] (II) AIGLX: Testing pixelFormatIndex 1
     [  1456.203] GL_VERSION:     4.6.0 - Build 27.20.100.8853
     [  1456.203] GL_VENDOR:      Intel
     [  1456.203] GL_RENDERER:    Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_SGI_make_current_read
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_SGI_swap_control
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_MESA_swap_control
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_SGIX_pbuffer
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_ARB_multisample
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_SGIS_multisample
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_ARB_fbconfig_float
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_EXT_fbconfig_packed_float
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_ARB_create_context
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_ARB_create_context_profile
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_ARB_create_context_robustness
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_EXT_create_context_es2_profile
     [  1456.203] (II) GLX: enabled GLX_ARB_framebuffer_sRGB
     [  1456.203] (II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_MESA_copy_sub_buffer
     [  1456.203] (II) 110 pixel formats reported by 
wglGetPixelFormatAttribivARB
     [  1456.218] (II) 74 fbConfigs
     [  1456.218] (II) ignored pixel formats: 0 not OpenGL, 0 unknown 
pixel type, 36 unaccelerated
     [  1456.218] (II) GLX: Initialized Win32 native WGL GL provider for 
screen 0
     [  1456.453] winPointerWarpCursor - Discarding first warp: 1280 720
     [  1456.453] (--) 16 mouse buttons found
     [  1456.453] (--) Setting autorepeat to delay=500, rate=31
     [  1456.453] (--) Windows keyboard layout: "00000409" (00000409) 
"US", type 7
     [  1456.453] (--) Found matching XKB configuration "English (USA)"
     [  1456.453] (--) Model = "pc105" Layout = "us" Variant = "none" 
Options = "none"
     [  1456.453] Rules = "base" Model = "pc105" Layout = "us" Variant = 
"none" Options = "none"
     [  1456.453] [  1456.453] winInitMultiWindowWM - DISPLAY=:0.0
     winMultiWindowXMsgProc - DISPLAY=:0.0
     [  1456.656] winInitMultiWindowWM - xcb_connect () returned and 
successfully opened the display.
     [  1456.656] winProcEstablishConnection - winInitClipboard returned.
     [  1456.656] winClipboardThreadProc - DISPLAY=:0.0
     [  1456.656] winMultiWindowXMsgProc - xcb_connect() returned and 
successfully opened the display.
     [  1456.656] winClipboardProc - xcb_connect () returned and 
successfully opened the display.
     [  1456.656] Using Composite redirection
     [  1490.390] executing '/bin/mintty', pid 772
     [  1902.312] executing '/bin/mintty', pid 1200

You can see the last two things that were launched. And here’s the 
process list

     29267 rrobert1> ps -ef
          UID     PID    PPID  TTY        STIME COMMAND
     rrobert1     610       1 ?        08:31:58 /usr/bin/mintty
     rrobert1     471       1 ?        08:31:46 /usr/bin/gpg-agent
     rrobert1     772     605 ?        08:32:24 /usr/bin/XWin
     rrobert1    1205     611 pty0     08:39:31 /usr/bin/ps
     rrobert1     403       1 cons0    08:31:42 /usr/bin/sh
     rrobert1     442       1 ?        08:31:44 /usr/bin/ssh-agent
     rrobert1     611     610 pty0     08:31:58 /usr/bin/bash
     rrobert1     604     403 cons0    08:31:49 /usr/bin/xinit
     rrobert1    1200     605 ?        08:39:16 /usr/bin/XWin
     rrobert1     605     604 cons0    08:31:49 /usr/bin/XWin
     rrobert1     609     604 ?        08:31:50 /usr/bin/sh

where you can see those processes are launch, but they show as 
additional instances of XWin and mintty was never started. My .XWinrc 
contain this

     menu root {
             "Cygwin Terminal" exec  "/bin/mintty"
                 "Emacs"           exec     "/bin/emacs"
             // […]
     }

Any suggestions on where to poke to diagnose this? My home Windows 10 
machine has no problem at all. Oh, and cygcheck report version 3.1.4. 
Yes, that’s a little old, but we are stuck there until we can work out 
an issue with our build environment and the change for 3.1.5+ in how 
symlinks are handled.

-- 
Roland Roberts, PhD
Brooklyn, NY USA
https://astrofoto.org



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