Re: Can't start X after upgrading to cygwin1.7

[Jon TURNEY <jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk>]

On 23/01/2010 15:37, Jeff Spirko wrote:
>>>> On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 12:56 PM, Andrew Senior<aws@andrewsenior.com>  wrote:
>>>> I've had cygwin installed for a year on my Thinkpad T61, running
>>>> Windows XP professional, and just ran the latest setup.exe from
>>>> cygwin.com.
>>>> I now can't run X with startxwin.exe (no process appears, no icon in
>>>> the system tray, clients won't start)
>>>> No /var/log/Xwin.0.log is written, nor anywhere else I can see in /var/log

I think the original poster had a broken installation, there's no other reason 
for it to get fixed by a reinstall :-)

> I had the same symptoms.  Non-administrator WinXP users couldn't start
> the XWin Server, and no /var/log/XWin.0.log was created.  The log file
> could get created if there wasn't one already present, which led me to
> put the log file in the user's directory instead of /var/log.  The
> other problem was that users couldn't create the /tmp/.X0-lock file
> and /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 socket if they were left by another user.  The
> solution was to give each user their own /tmp directory.
>
> I fixed it with the following:
> 1.  Added a line in /etc/profile, just before the "chmod 1777 /tmp" line:
>       mount -f "$USERPROFILE/Local Settings/Temp" /tmp
>
> 2.  Changed the XWin Server icon so instead of just startxwin.exe, it says:
>       ... "startxwin.exe -- -logfile ~/XWin.log"
> (Don't take out the beginning of the command that runs startxwin
> through bash, or the /etc/profile won't get run.  The quotes are
> needed because this is the argument to bash's -c option.)
>
> Could any of the guru's comment on how good or bad these solutions are?

Thanks.  It's long been suspected that there is some problem with lockfiles 
running XWin as a non-administrator user (See FAQ 3.4,[1]), but I've never had 
a sufficient clear description to understand what the problem is, until now.

The only problem I see with your solution is that you are assuming only a 
single user is logged in.  This might not be the case on a Terminal Server 
(although it would probably take a specific sequence of 
privileged/unprivileged logins and XWin startups/shutdowns to show a problem)

This would be better fixed in XWin itself by arranging to give these files the 
correct permissions, if we could work out how to do that :-)

[1] http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/cygwin-x-faq.html#q-cant-read-lock-file

-- 
Jon TURNEY
Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer

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