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

[Roland Roberts]

On 8/21/2021 10:49 AM, Jon Turney wrote:
> On 10/08/2021 13:58, 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).
>
> I'm not sure what the evidence for this hypothesis is?

You're right, it was a complete guess since that's been where most of my 
problems have been with the new machine.


> [...]
> The process being created, but not changing command is usually 
> symptomatic of problems with cygwin's fork emulation (i.e. the child 
> process gets stuck during the complex synchronization it does with the 
> parent, before exec gets called)
>
>> 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.
>
> There are some suggestions about dealing with fork problems in the 
> FAQ, but sometimes nothing works and we don't know why.

Thanks, I'll look through those suggestions. I'm still trying to figure 
out what the key difference in my two environments is that on Windows 10 
machine works fine for this and the other doesn't. And the one where it 
doesn't, it only doesn't work when launched from the XWinrc menu, it 
works fine when launched from mintty.

roland


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