Re: cygwin (was: Excessively grandiose product names)

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From: Phil Pennock
Subject: Re: cygwin (was: Excessively grandiose product names)
Date: 03:51 on 27 Jan 2007
On 2007-01-24 at 20:01 +0100, H.Merijn Brand wrote:
> I would love to see KDE running on it :)
> (Yes, that is what I run on Cygwin)

> On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 11:02:22 -0600, Peter da Silva <peter@xxxxxxx.xxx> wrote:
> > There's several available for Windows, from prices starting as low
> > as free, and if all else fails you can use one of the bundled
> > just-enough-cygwin-to-run-XFree86 combinations. You  don't have to hate
> > cygwin directly at all.

I tried dealing with Cygwin and the way that having "real Cygwin"
installed would break software which ships with "minimal Cygwin
libraries to work" and gave up to go do something more productive, like
getting drunk.

So for X11, I ended up going with one of the "cheap but not free"
options for Windows, Mi/X from MicroImages; what makes it relevant here
is that it has one or more[*] bug-compatibility options to make KDE work
better, including stuff with the cut&paste integration.  So it might
work for Merijn.

There's stuff I dislike in Mi/X, but it's try-before-you-buy and it was
$25, so I at least knew it would work for my purposes.  You need to
explicitly fiddle with the settings to make it run rootless (ie, X
applications appear on the Win32 desktop) and to make it not exit when
the last application using it quits, but then it was okay, at the time.

Of course, since then GTK has continued its slide towards requiring X11
extensions without checking in advance that they're present or
gracefulll degrading, so various programs which used to work really well
with Mi/X no longer do so, because security updates to the underlaying
GUI toolkit library broke things for people using X11 as a remote
windowing toolkit.  You know, that thing it was vaguely designed to do.

I miss Xt; it was butt-ugly but it worked, reliably and portably.  It
was cool to be able to aim viewres at something and figure out how to
configure it without having to fight whatever limited options the
programmer might have exposed.  I'm probably forgetting a lot of pain,
though.

Mi/X:
  http://www.microimages.com/mix/
(Only relationship is that I'm a satisfied customer)

[*] I'm using a Mac laptop now, so can't double-check easily
There's stuff above here

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