trippedbreaker ([info]trippedbreaker) wrote in [info]linux,
@ 2008-03-26 19:59:00
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Gnome desktop, nautilus, etc on cygwin X?
I've recently been stuck doing a lot of work on a windows XP system, and it's a situation I can't change in the short term. I've seriously started to miss my Gentoo and Fedora, so as a coping mechanism of sorts, I've installed cygwin and have poked through the installer to see how much of my familiar set of tools and programs I can load. I used to use Cygwin a bit at work, but it's been a while and I'm just getting into it again.

I appreciate the default X server, which shows X application windows alongside other Windows apps, but I'd like to actually have a X desktop in a window that I can switch to like a Windows application itself, and set that up with Gnome. In fact I notice a "Gnome" category in the Cygwin installer, but I can't find the stuff you'd normally have with a basic Gnome install, e.g. Metacity, Nautilus, Evolution, etc.

Does anyone have experience with setting this kind of thing up within Cygwin? And more generally, for apps that are not available via the Cygwin install program, is it most common to just download the source and do the "configure;make;make install" thing?

Thanks, and I hope Cygwin isn't too off-topic for this community.

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XLive -- this may or may not help
[info]illubrious
2008-03-27 03:38 am UTC (link)
Firstly, a remote host running UNIX, that has xorg installed, and you have ssh access to is required for this.

I've used a program in the past called, Xlive. Xlive, based on cygwin, allows a user a complete gnome session, or any other window manager, within its own window.

Check out Xlive here: http://xlivecd.indiana.edu/

Hope this helped

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Re: XLive -- this may or may not help
[info]trippedbreaker
2008-03-27 05:04 am UTC (link)
This is a great answer; just not to the question I asked. I've done stuff like this in the past, though I haven't used XLiveCD specifically. In fact, I quite enjoyed being able to start a full-blown Gnome session on a Solaris server, having my Gnome desktop there appear on my Win2k workstation in a window. While everyone else was stuck using vi to edit files over a terminal session or using ftp to move stuff back and forth and utilities to convert newlines, I'd just fire up Eclipse or gedit. Very nice. :o)

What I'm asking about here is installing Cygwin-based software on my Windows XP system. I don't have continuous high-bandwidth access to a different computer, and I'm wanting to see how much of the software I'm used to has been successfully ported or compiled for Cygwin, and is known to work well when hosted on it.

If anyone's gotten a Gnome desktop with Nautilus and Metacity running under Cygwin, that's a great start -- I'd appreciate a description of how you did it! :o)

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[info]amblinwiseass
2008-03-27 10:49 am UTC (link)
1) You may already have determined that the trick to getting your whole X desktop in a window (as opposed to mingling X and Windows windows) is to start X without the '-multiwindow' switch.

2) I haven't tried it, but it appears that the Gnome tools you want may indeed be available via Cygwin setup, thanks to the Cygwin Ports project. They claim that adding their repository to setup's URL list provides install packages including both Gnome and KDE.

Again, I haven't tried that, but it looks reasonably like being what you're looking for. If you try it, I'd be interested to hear how it goes. Hope this helps!

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[info]trippedbreaker
2008-03-27 08:53 pm UTC (link)
This (Cygwin Ports) is exactly what I was hoping for. Gnome desktop, panel, applet and startup script stuff is there, Metacity, Nautilus, various extensions, plugins etc.

Unfortunately, it doesn't actually work as far as I can tell, and in fact just installing the above has broken what little I had working before. Now, all X applications silently fail. I run "startx" to get an xterm (which does still appear) and then from the xterm I try running something like "gedit" or "gvim". Unlike yesterday, I now immediately get another prompt. No process gets launched, no error messages that I can find. Using the "startgnome" script, I get a blank X root window, no window manager, no apps, no menus.

I guess the answer is that you can't do this unless you have copious time to waste screwing with it, which at the moment I don't.

Anyway, thanks for the tip... maybe eventually I'll get back into it.

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[info]amblinwiseass
2008-03-27 10:15 pm UTC (link)
My apologies; I guess this is what I get for recommending something I haven't tried.

I guess the answer is that you can't do this unless you have copious time to waste screwing with it, which at the moment I don't.

That's Cygwin in a nutshell. I mean, I don't want to denigrate the diligent efforts of blah blah blah, but in my experience you just can't get it to work right unless you've got the time to spend on it. I wouldn't be running the damn thing at all if I could find Linux ACPI and sound drivers that worked with my hardware.

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[info]lightning_rose
2008-03-27 02:42 pm UTC (link)

You could download the free vmplayer from vmware.com and run Linux in a virtual machine. However, unless your XP box has over 1GB of RAM, and a dual core CPU, performance may be sluggish.

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