Re: "Legacy" Installation of XFree86/Cygwin vs. Setup.exe XFree86 Packages

[Randall R Schulz <rrschulz at cris dot com>]

Matt,

Well, after waiting a while for some feedback, I took the plunge. I don't 
think there's a problem but...

When (or after) I run XFree86/Cygwin, my system develops serious stability 
problems. The last time it happened, I first noticed that my dual-CPU 
system was showing only one CPU in the Task Manager "Performance" tab. That 
scared me, so I decided to reboot. More problem symptoms followed. When the 
boot process completed the hardware scan and got to the point where the 
"Welcome to Windows 2000" low-resolution splash screen would be taken down 
and the monitor resolution switched, I instead got a long period of disk 
activity, which I took to be an automatically invoked file system check (I 
have all NTFS systems, so I'm not used to this happening and it alarmed 
me). There was no indication of what was happening (as their ordinarily 
would be for a checkdsk, either manually requested or automatically 
invoked). However, once that was done, the system booted normally. 
Nonetheless, I don't like things like this happening to my system.

Now, I assume XFree86/Cygwin has no kernel or driver components and that 
this symptom points to a problem in the driver for my Matrox G400 MAX 
(which is the latest driver). Over the past couple of years since I've had 
this card, I've found that new Matrox drivers improve upon the old ones 
(they've fixed some odd symptoms in Java GUIs and in Mozilla) without any 
down-sides, but it appears that's not so this time.


Anyway, unless someone tells me that these symptoms really could have been 
the result of problems in XFree86/Cygwin and that re-installation using 
Setup.exe over an older "manual" installation could lead to this, I'm 
assuming my XFree86/Cygwin installation is OK.

I downloaded and installed all the XFree86/Cygwin packages, by the way.


However, I'm loath to use XFree86 while this problem lurks. I have 
comprehensive daily backups and all, but tempting fate like this is not my 
idea of a thrill (that's what bicycling in urban traffic is for)...


Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA



At 14:31 2002-05-09, Matt Wilkie wrote:
>I haven't seen an answer to this one yet. Is that because no one knows? 
>I'm in the same boat.
>
>-matt wilkie
>
>
>Randall R Schulz wrote:
>>Hi,
>>
>>I installed XFree86/Cygwin via the "semi-manual" procedure that predates 
>>the release of Setup.exe packages.
>>
>>I want to know how I should handle switching over to the Setup.exe-based 
>>installation of XFree86/Cygwin.
>>
>>Should I just download the packages and install "over" the existing 
>>XFree86/Cygwin installation? (I always download binary & source packages 
>>and then separately install only the binaries, keeping the sources in 
>>tarball form until I should happen to need them).
>>
>>If it matters, I've installed a couple of separate XFree86 software 
>>packages (XFig and the NCAR Graphics and NCL systems). The NCAR software 
>>installation isn't trivial, so if I could avoid having to redo it, that 
>>would be preferable.
>>
>>Thanks.
>>
>>Randall Schulz
>>Mountain View, CA USA