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

[Eliot Moss]

On 8/18/2021 7:19 PM, Roland Roberts wrote:
> 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.

A wondering:

- How are the programs mentioned in the .XWinrrc file?

- Is /usr/bin on the PATH when XWin is started?

I recall having issues around the PATH at some point ...

Regards - Eliot Moss