Installing cygwin/xfree

["Richard.GRENON" <Richard dot GRENON at wanadoo dot fr>]

I am not a developper but just a humble user coming from the Unix world. For my first contact with the PC world and Windows, I am trying to install on my new laptop a 3D graphic code that I had written under Unix. The main 3D part of this code is written in Fortran and its very simple 2D graphic interface is written in C with X11 routines. First I installed a Salford Fortran 77 compiler working in a DOS window, then I installed cygwin_b20 (or b20.1, I am not sure, but it seems to me that it was from the last full.exe file a few days ago) to have the gcc compiler. Installation of Cygwin from the full.exe file was very easy. Both Salford ftn77 and Cygwin gcc compilers are working well in a Cygnus window with bash and I can easily mix Fortran and C routines. Salford and Cygwin are exactly what I needed.

 

The problems came when I tried to install cygwin/xfree, because my knowledge about administration of operating systems and X11 is really near zero! I have downloaded the cygwin-xfree-x11r6.4-cygwin-b20.1.tar.bz2 archive, installed X11R6.4 in /usr, put /usr/X11R6.4/bin in my PATH variable, but I could not run any X11 utility, such as xterm : Can't open Display! I guessed that this was because no X server was defined, so I downloaded XGGI.exe, although I have read on the web that most of the X servers for cygwin/xfree are still buggy (Use at your own risk !!!). I put XGGI.exe in /usr/X11R6.4/bin and made X as a link to XGGI.exe. Then remembering some features of X11 under Unix, I tried to start X11 with xdm or xinit. I could not use xdm (only root can use xdm, so how can I define root ?) and xinit failed (LIBGG.0.0.6.DLL not found!). I have spent several hours on the web with a very bad connection, even on mirrors sites, I have read some FAQ and all information that I could reach, but I could not find a clear X11 installation guide for beginners or an automatic installation file such as the full.exe that I used for cygwin_b20. I should like to download only the binaries as I did for cygwin_b20, but what is not very clear is what should I download to make X11 work. Each readme file for a binary says that you need some other stuff from another place and it is very difficult to have a clear overview of the minimum package that you really need.

 

Of course, I could rebuild the 2D interface of my code with some Fortran graphic routines that are available in Salford ftn77, but I should like to keep the X11 features of my code. My laptop is a Compaq Presario 1800-XL182 with a Pentium III processor at 500 MHz, 64 Mb memory and an ATI 3D Rage LT PRO AGP 2X video card working with Windows 98. If anybody at cygwin can help me, my question is very simple : what should I do to make X11 work on my laptop (I guess the answer would not be so simple ...) or where can I found the information ? Thank you in advance for helping me getting out of the tunnel, or at least for giving me some light.

 

Best regards

 

Richard Grenon
40 Avenue de la Division Leclerc
92320 Châtillon
e-mail : Richard.GRENON@wanadoo.fr