RE: startxwin/XWin won't start properly

["Timares, Brian (Harris)" <Brian.Timares@va.gov>]

Larry Hall (Cygwin X) wrote:
>On 6/30/2010 1:07 AM, Bradley, Mike wrote:
>> OK, I removed my old cygwin installation (the directory which contains/usr,
>> /bin/, etc.), and re-installed a new version.  I kept the "cygwin_package"
>> directory, but setup.exe did not remember my previous installation.  In the
>> past I have had to install cygwin on multiple machines, and it would be nice
>> to learn a way to have a file which describes the packages I want to install,
>> rather than having to recall them all.
>
>'setup.exe' doesn't remember your previous installations - ones you have
>removed.  There'd be little call for that kind of functionality.  'setup.exe'

I disagree.  I've had to reinstall cygwin from scratch several times, and also have different coworkers who can benefit from cygwin, but saying "Go through the long list of groupings, including the even longer sublist of packages, ignoring lib*" is not very helpful.  Most of my coworkers are not sysadmins or Unix gurus so they look at a lot of packages and say "I'll just use puTTY".  And it takes a lot of time.  But no one wants EVERYTHING, a lot of it is not useful to us.

It would be great to be able to have a file I can email them saying "Use this, it'll load everything you need.".  And of course have a copy for myself for when I get a new machine, or the OS has to be reloaded, or I have cygwin problems (perhaps related to the anti-virus, but still).

Such a thing would be great for anyone who wants to test the bleeding edge.  If they knew rolling back was simple they'd be encouraged to be daring.

>does allow you to install from a local directory though.  So if you keep
>the directory that contained all the packages you've downloaded previously,
>you can point 'setup.exe' at this directory and tell it to install everything.

This will help me in some cases, though it won't for my coworkers (none of whom are local to my area).

If I renamed the local directory from, say "http%3a%2f%2fmirror.mcs.anl.gov%2fcygwin%2f" to say "http%3a%2f%2fmirror.cs.vt.edu%2fcygwin%2f, will that work?


Brian Timares