Re: Cygwin/X and cygrunsrv

[René Berber <r dot berber at computer dot org>]

Igor Peshansky wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Dec 2006, Tomasz Blachowicz wrote:
>>
>> Have a question to more experienced users. Is it possible to run
>> Cygwin/X as service on my XP box? Currently I've added startxwin.bat
>> to Windows Startup so it starts at the system startup. But I'd like to
>> run X server using cygrunsrv like httpd2, ssh and cron. Although I'm
>> not certain it's a good idea in general.
>>
>> Every piece of advice is welcome, I'd appreciate it.
> 
> Tom,
> 
> Contrary to the popular belief and the unfortunate naming, the X server is
> not really a server.

Uh?  And it just happens to be based on Xorg-X11 (previuosly XFree86).

> It is an application that accepts requests from
> other applications (called the X clients) and draws them on the screen.

And the window manager is usually the X client sending requests.  The user
application goes to the middleman (window manager), which in Cygwin X is part of
the server (but another window manager can be used optionally, like WindowMaker
for instance).

> This means that it needs to have access to the Windows desktop (which is
> one of the reasons it cannot successfully run as a service).

And the -i parameter of cygrunsrv wouldn't help because...

>  You are probably better off with your current setup.

It is probably not easy to do what the OP asked, and I haven't even tried but I
think it is possible.

First you have to know what you really want: running X as service will not
magically produce a login window if you try to connect from another machine, and
setting up gnome-session/xsm/ksmserver is probably not easy.  But that is not a
good objective anyway, if you wanted something like that you use any Unix OS.

But, for an already logged in user, I think it just works (meaning a running X
server will allow to open X applications).  I do something similar, not a
service that starts on boot, but a background X server that is running without
the usual xterm that you can't close (the next step would be to test cygrunsrv
with, and w/o, the -i option).
-- 
René Berber


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