updating my cygwin installation left me in trouble again — was: Microsoft Windows and the X Window System

$ startxwin

I usually prefer the rootless way.

My applications nowadays “usually” run on a Linux (Debian, …) system or AIX.

Update 2018-04-18: After some cygwin updating startxwin prefers to shut down immediately instead of offering me a menu (“xwin-xdg-menu … — an XDG Desktop Menu Specification menu“) in the system tray. I only use it for starting a Cygwin terminal. How bad, I wasn’t able to recall the name of that menu. You cannot search, what you cannot name.

I had no idea, that startxwin uses this start-up file: /etc/X11/xinit/startxwinrc . The last utility called there usually makes X wait for ever, but it faulted:

/usr/bin/xwin-xdg-menu

This is an alternative way to start X / my fallback solution:

$ xinit — -multiwindow -clipboard

Within a shell window started there I ran:

$ strace /usr/bin/xwin-xdg-menu

It said, there was a problem with  cygfreetype-6.dll . This web page tells you, which cygwin packages include the file in question:

https://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-grep.cgi

I reinstalled that package, and everything was fine.

Any lesson learned? The cygwin updating silently (?!?) left at least one corrupt file (again …). Quite hard to find out, which one was concerned. I reinstalled that package within cygwin set-up, and my problem was solved. I cost me a couple of hours — and I did not need the thrill, trust me!


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