1.5.23 on vista: difficulties launching X

[Dick Repasky <rrepasky at lack dot ucs dot indiana dot edu>]

I'm experiencing difficulty starting X on a fresh install of cygwin 
on a fresh install of Windows Vista.  I've tried both startxwin.sh and startx. 
startxwin.sh always fails, and startx sometimes succeeds. A copy of cygcheck
output is attached.

startxwin.sh fails in three ways.

  1) Immediately after the system has been booted, a popup appears to notify
     me that sh.exe has exited, and X seems to be stalled.  An X appears
     in the toolbar, and both xterm and XWin are in the cygwin process table
     (ps -aux).  No xterm appears. A copy of the combined standard output
     and standard input are provided in startxwin.sh-outerr-postreboot.

     The xterm in the process table can be killed with kill -TERM.

     Attempts to launch an xterm fail. (I open a new cygwin window, set
     and export DISPLAY, and run xterm).

     XWin cannot be killed with kill -TERM.  It can be killed with kill -9.

     All of the above is repeatable if the system is rebooted.

     I have seen the previous post of sh.exe exit that turned out not to
     be repeatable. Maybe the above will provide some insight on getting it
     to repeat.

     Without rebooting, what happens on subsequent runs of startxwin.sh
     depends on how I clean up from the first failed run.

 2)  If I clean up from a first failed run by killing the xterm and
     Xwin, subsequent runs of startxwin fail with a popup stating that
     Cygwin X has failed.

     The cause seems to be a lingering sh.exe process in the table.

 3) If I clean up from a first failed run by dismissing the cygwin terminal
    window by clicking on the window-close button, the sh.exe process goes
    away, and startxwin.sh fails with a message like "xterm 3228 child_copy:
    linked dll data write copy failed, ...".  Full output is attached as
    startxwin.sh-outerr.

    Unlike the previous poster who reported a similar error, there is no
    logitech camera or virus program running on the system. It is indeed a
    fresh install.

startx sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails.  It succeeds in 35 % of runs and
    fails in 65 % of runs. A contingency table indicates that success of
    successive runs are independent of one another: observed cell frequencies
    are very close to expected values.

    Again if startx is run immediately after a system reboot, it fails in a
    manner that is similar to that in which startxwin.sh fails.

    Subsequent runs sometimes work or not.  If they work the X server
    exits normally when xterm that has been run in the foreground exits.

    When it fails, it too fails with the xterm child copy error, but that
    error is followed by a number of other messages as processes shut down.
    A combined output and error are attached as startx-outerr.

Hope that helps,

Dick


Dick Repasky
Center for Computational Cytomics
UITS Cubicle 101.08
Indiana University
USA

rrepasky@indiana.edu

Attachment: cygcheck.info
Description: Text document

Attachment: startxwin.sh-outerr-postreboot
Description: Text document

Attachment: startxwin.sh-outerr
Description: Text document

Attachment: startx-outerr
Description: Text document

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