When you start up Cygwin’s X.Org X11 server via startxwin.exe, it likes to leave an xterm window open on your desktop.
I suppose this is kind of handy if you were manually starting Cygwin/X, it’s pretty annoying if you have it set to start up when you log in to Windows. To keep this from happening, you just need to add an empty .startxwinrc file to your Cygwin home directory. That is, start the Cygwin bash shell, and use this command:
touch .startxwinrc
That’s it! No more xterm windows popping up.
Oh, if you’d rather have something besides xterm start up when you start Cygwin/X, you can just add a list of commands to .startxwinrc and it will execute them after starting the X.Org server.
Tags: Cygwin
I’m using 1.9.2 … now I have managed to get the server start failure even without .startxwinrc (though not as often – happens every time if I have a .startxwinrc). There are similar reports dating back a year ago (“another window manager is running”) but no solutions to be found. So, I’m stuck … but it isn’t purely about the .startxwinrc.
I updated to the current version of the Xwin server today (1.9.2 built on 2010-11-03) and everything seems to be working as expected.
Been using this for a while … but a couple of days ago, it started preventing the server from starting. Now, if I have the empty .startxwinrc file there the server complains:
[ 22137.468] winMultiWindowXMsgProc – another window manager is running. Exiting.
[ 22137.468] winClipboardProc – winClipboardFlushWindowsMessageQueue trapped WM_QUIT message, exiting main loop.
[ 22137.468] winClipboardProc – XDestroyWindow succeeded.
[ 22137.468] winClipboardProc – Clipboard disabled – Exit from server
[ 22137.468] winMultiWindowXMsgProcIOErrorHandler!
That’s really handy, thanks!
Thanks for posting this! What a simple solution to an otherwise annoying little problem!