RE: Multiple XWin.exe programs loading and no xterm

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Fri, 8 Apr 2005, Phil Betts wrote:

> IIRC, there was talk a while back of making the multiwindow manager an
> external client.  I don't know if anythng has been done in this
> direction, but if this were done, there would at least be a consistent
> startup for all WMs.

There is an external MWWM client, but, IIRC, it doesn't work too well ATM.
Kensuke would be the best person to talk about it, I guess...

> An alternative that I've not seen raised before: I was wondering if it
> would be possible to run XWin as a Windows service (presumably via
> cygserver).

Services are run by 'cygrunsrv', not 'cygserver'.  'cygserver' provides
Unix shared memory and IPC services for Cygwin.

> The upside is that it would probably make more sense to those coming to
> X from a Windows background.  The downside is that there are so many
> different ways to start X (i.e. local/remote, multiwindow/external WM
> etc.) that you'd still need to support the traditional startup methods.

Well, I don't recall if XWin has a way of selecting the next available
display (I do know it's not on by default, even if it exists), but that
would be pretty much a must in coping with an X service when one needs to
also start an XDMCP query, for example.

> I know zip about the issues involved in running as a Windows service,
> but if it's simple, it may be something to consider, perhaps as a
> default installation.

It's pretty simple to start a program as a service.  One wouldn't want to
have it as a default option, certainly, but a config script akin to that
of other service packages (e.g., cron, openssh, cygserver, etc) that
*installs* such a service for the user to start would be very useful.

> As a sidenote, historically (IMHO), X startup has been a bit of a
> mess.  A lot of old X servers were started by running X and a WM in
> the background, then running xterm as a foreground task, just to
> enable switching (or more likely restarting) window managers.  If they
> inadvertently closed the initial xterm, the poor user was stuffed!  I
> know - I was that user!

It would be trivial to write a "keepX" program that connects to the server
and does nothing (but is a client, so X stays around even if no other
clients are present).  If such a program were contributed to the xorg
packages (or, better yet, the upstream X distribution), the default
xinitrc could invoke it in the background before the xterm.
HTH,
	Igor
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