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Re: Using only the X server of Cygwin


Hey, Nicholas -- don't squish Rhialto that quickly. He's probably one of our new users who knows nothing about the cygwin project except what he read on slashdot this morning.

The fact is, Rhialto, we focus on cygwin -- as an environment all by itself, *and* independent of any specific intended use or resource availability(*). You have a specific setup, where you want to leverage you existing resources (e.g. a local linux-based font server) to avoid downloading extra stuff.

You are an advanced (linux) user, with a very specific purpose in mind. That's not the target of the cygwin (or cygwin-xfree) project. It *IS* possible to do what you want -- but there isn't a super-simple one-click path to do it. [Think about user interface design: there can only be a limited number of 'easy' [one-click, two-click] configurations. We use those for the "normal" users -- folks who want the cygwin environment, not folks who want JUST 'Xwin -broadcast' and nothing else -- or JUST ssh and nothing else).

However, it SHOULD be possible -- and checking the ml archives on this will help -- to create a custom 'setup.ini' script or pseudo-package that setup.exe can read, to install ONLY what you want -- but this will take a little work on your part. Again, check the archives.

The basic thing is, setup is configured to install the 'Base' package by default (think Debian's 'base' category). Base is about 50Meg unpacked I think. Then, on top of that, there are certain things that the xserv program itself needs -- like libpng's DLL, zlib's DLL, etc.


And it downloaded a
lot more which it apparently did not even install, such as bash, diff,
diffutils, fileutils, etc.

These are all part of the 'Base' category. If you explicitly de-selected specific items -- even if they are in the 'Base' category -- then setup shouldn't even download them. There may be a bug in setup.exe's handling of the Base category. Sorry about that.


(*) that is, cygwin-xfree should work OOB on a standalong machine without any external font server, at least by default. Do we really want a windows newbie to understand "oh, I also need to install the fonts". Of course not -- we do that by default IF the user installs X. [Linux distros do this too, you know -- if you install XFree86 on Red Hat, you *will* get the fonts.]

--Chuck





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