Cygwin/X
Last updated: 2004-04-23 1500 EDT (Harold L Hunt II)
Featured Screenshots
See the Screenshots page for more screenshots.
 (65 KiB) 2003-12-24 Multi-Window Mode and Exit Confirmation. |
 (69 KiB) 2003-12-24 Multi-Window Mode and Tray Menu. |
(66 KiB) 2003-12-24 Rootless, openbox wm, gv, xfig, and ddd running locally. |
Project Overview
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Cygwin/X is a port of the X Window System to the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. Cygwin/X runs on all recent consumer and business versions of Windows; as of 2003-12-27 those versions are specifically Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.
Cygwin/X consists of an X Server, X libraries, and nearly all of the standard X clients, such as xterm, xhost, xdpyinfo, xclock, and xeyes. Cygwin/X, as the name implies, uses the Cygwin project which provides a UNIX-like API to Xlib and X clients, thereby minimizing the amount of porting required.
Cygwin/X is licensed under an X style license; Cygwin is licensed under a modified GNU General Public License that specifically allows libcygwin1.a to be linked to programs that are licensed under an Open Source compliant license without such linking requiring that those Open Source programs be licensed under the GNU General Public License (see the Cygwin licensing page for more information). Source code and binaries for both projects are freely available.
Downloading and Installing
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Install Cygwin/X now |
Cygwin/X is installed via Cygwin's setup.exe and the installation process is documented in the Cygwin/X User's Guide. Whether or not you already have Cygwin installed, you can add Cygwin/X to your installation by downloading the latest setup.exe, running setup, and selecting the 'xorg-x11-base' package from the 'X11' category.
Using Cygwin/X is documented in a step-by-step manner, with lots of pictures and examples, in the Cygwin/X User's Guide. Please notice, however, that Cygwin/X contains many general-purpose programs, libraries, and functions that are part of all X distributions. It is therefore beyond the scope of the Cygwin/X User's Guide to document all of these X Window System components. To find documentation, for example, for setxkbmap one should consult the generic X documentation such as the SETXKBMAP(1) manual page. You could always, of course, do a Google search for setxkbmap, which finds the manual page mentioned above.
News
New maintainer wanted
Alexander Gottwald, the maintainer of Cygwin/X has started working for StarNet and has to end his work on Cygwin/X. We are currently searching for a new maintainer and developers. 2005-08-23
Big Changes - Thanks to Developers
The xorg-x11-xwin-6.7-5 release contains 22 changes, the largest change set in at least several months. All but one of these changes were created by (in alphabetical order): Alexander Gottwald, Kensuke Matsuzaki, Rodrigo Medina, Earle F. Philhower III, and Dan Wilks. Welcome to Dan Wilks, a new developer as of this release. 2004-04-23
The Clipboard Related Freezes are Most Likely Fixed
XFree86-xserv-4.3.0-61 includes an attempt to fix the Win32 application freezes being seen in some cases when pasting from X11 to Win32. Please try -61 if you have been having problems with clipboard related freezes. 2004-03-25
Cygwin/X Source Code Now Distributed via setup.exe
Source code for Cygwin/X is now distributed via Cygwin's setup.exe. Source code for the version of Cygwin/X in distribution was not previously widely available since our CVS tree has not had a release made from it yet. Cygwin/X building, packaging, and source code packaging are now all performed via a script in the 'base' source code package. 2004-03-14
Multi-Window Mode Performance Improvement
Takuma Murakami made a change to the multi-window mode in XFree86-xserv-4.3.0-51 that resulted in a significant performance increase. For example, xfig used to require 7 seconds to initialize and the screen flashed during this initialization; after Takuma's changes xfig requires 2 seconds to initialize and the screen no longer flashes. 2004-03-09
XFree86-xserv-4.3.0-42 no longer steals selection ownership and works with Xdmcp
Alexander Gottwald and Harold L Hunt II devised a plan to prevent the clipboard integration manager (invoked via the -clipboard command-line parameter) from having to steal ownership of the X11 selection each time it is changed. Harold implemented this and posted it in version 4.3.0-42, which is available now via Cygwin's setup.exe. A magic cookie is created when using Xdmcp so that the clipboard client will be authorized to connect. Additionally, XDM and Xdmcp are prevented from killing the clipboard client when they go through their initialization process. 2004-01-16
CVS source code now hosted on freedesktop.org
The Cygwin/X source code is now hosted on freedesktop.org's CVS repository; our particular repository is administered in cooperation with X.org. See our CVS page for information on how to access the source code. 2003-12-01
Please send Cygwin/X related questions, observations, news, announcements, and technical problems (bad html, broken links) concerning these web pages to the cygwin-xfree mailing list.
