Re: Startx on WinXP

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu>]

On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Brian L. Walter wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I've recently installd cygwin on both a win98 machine and a winxp machine.
> The win98 installs works great (except for being really slow, but that's a
> hardware issue.)  On the XP side, I've installed it, but getting some
> strange behavior.  If I do a 'startx', I get the following:
>
> [: and: unknown operand
> [: and: unknown operand
>
> After doing some playing around with the startx script, I've come to realize
> it's complaining about the bash conditional statements.  As though I'm not
> running under bash....
>
> And as far as I can see, I am.  The fall out of this behavior is the
> inability to control which window manager gets started.  I can get around
> that by commenting out all of the conditionals in startx, but, this seems at
> best a temporary work around.
>
> Am I missing something in setting up/configuring cygwin to run under XP,
> something that is different than win98?
>
> TIA
> Brian L. Walter

Brian,

You didn't do anything wrong.  This problem is most likely due to you
having either HOME or TMP set to "C:\Documents and Settings\...".  The
"and" in "Documents and settings" is what startx complains about (since it
doesn't quote paths properly).

I've posted a patch to startx a while ago that fixed this, but it looks
like it hasn't been incorporated in the latest release.  Since startx is
just a text file, you can simply apply the patch yourself from
<http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2003-11/msg00314.html> (use "patch -p0
< startx.patch" in /usr/X11R6/bin).
	Igor
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