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

[Roland Roberts]

On 8/10/2021 8:58 AM, Roland Roberts wrote:
> 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).
>
> [...]
>     [  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
>
> 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.
>
So, no suggestions :-(

I'm looking for anything at all that I could put into my .XWinrc that 
might produce some diagnostic output short of running XWin under a 
debugger. I'm completely guessing that it's a permission thing.

As I mentioned, I *can* launch X applications from a Cygwin mintty shell 
console after setting DISPLAY, including being able to launch things 
like Emacs, so whatever is stopping these from displaying, it's only 
affecting things launched from my .XWinrc.

roland

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