Re: xfree86 install makes wininit not working

["Ilya Goldin" <goldin+ at pitt dot edu>]

"Harold Hunt" <huntharo@msu.edu> wrote in message
NHEELHJHHFKPMAEAFMFCCECFCNAA.huntharo@msu.edu">news:NHEELHJHHFKPMAEAFMFCCECFCNAA.huntharo@msu.edu...
> Basically: do we need to pull the Cygwin/XFree86 setup.exe release for
now,
> or can I go on with making changes to the web page, etc to announce the
> release?


Personal experience: I installed Xfree via the new setup.exe routine over an
existing 4.2.0 installation. At the time, I was running rxvt and openssh,
but not running Xfree. Cygwin warned me I'd have to restart to replace
files.

When I restarted, Win2K (which is what I'm running here, with all the latest
patches), got stuck at the end of its second start-up screen (the first one
is text-mode, the second one has the pretty W2K logo and a blue progress
indicator). I could see my HD light blinking, and the PC was obviously doing
something, but it remained "stuck" on this screen for several minutes. This
repeated after a hard reset (couldn't do a soft one). Ultimately, I had to
boot into the F8-on-startup screen, and go with "last known good config".
Only that got me back into W2K. (I was getting pretty worried by this time!)

Having read the list since, I surmise that the WININIT.INI routine was
replacing files during that start-up screen delay, but it took so
ridiculously long (on a Pentium II 400, w/ 256 RAM), that I had to do
several hard restarts to get anywhere, and ended up aborting that procedure
anyway. (After which I deleted my entire Cygwin setup and reinstalled from
scratch.)

Notes from the field,
ig
P.S. I guess the other burning question is why did setup.exe decide that it
couldn't overwrite the Xfree files even though Xfree wasn't in use?

-- Ilya Goldin <www.pitt.edu/~goldin>