I recently upgraded my Cygwin install and noticed that Cygwin has switched it's X server XWin.exe from the XFree86 codebase to the Xorg codebase. Besides an updated logo, it also has some other side-effects.
I have a bunch of free Ogg Vorbis audio files that I've downloaded from Kahvi.org. They're great! But recently they've been including cover art within the files, which breaks Windows Media Player (it can't handle the very long tags of binhex-coded JPGs).
Since I rather like WMP's integration in windows (keyboard shortcuts), and Amarok isn't quite ready for win32, I thought I'd find a way to strip the troublesome tags from the data files rather than change to another player.
Here's a quick-and-dirty shell hack to remove the tags from the files and get them playable by daft players such as Windows Media PlayerEmacs long-awaited version 22.1 was released on 2007-07-02, and a package for Cygwin was available a few months later. The Cygwin package is still experimental, so Cygwin's setup program will select 21 by default.
Okay, so I hate working in Windows, but on my employer's equipment at least, I must live with it. After having had this machine replaced twice (faulty Dell hardware) and rebuilt more times than I can remember (Windows BSODs), for a total of at least 3 system migrations this past year, I thought I'd better keep a list of what free software to install on top of Windows, and what adjustments to make, so that at least I don't feel like I'm wearing a straight jacket. Here goes:
MJL20080827 -- Update: I Just realised that this is one of my top-visited pages and it's a totally disorganised and incongruent pile of... What's worse is, I've never updated it since the promised update back in March 2007!
Let me clear things up (and save you wading through the whole article): If you want remote access to your openSUSE desktop from a networked thin client, then forget about X11, XDMCP, VNC or tunneling X through SSH. Use the NX protocol. You'll need to do the following:
The upshot: I've done this with a FreeNX server and Nomachine's NX client for Windows XP, and it all "just works", except maybe for some font issues with older X clients like emacs (install extra font packages from nomachine to fix that), and some transparency effect issues I noticed in kwin4, probably to do with X11 extensions missing in the NX client. Not a big deal.
Read the rest of this article for the boring background and laughable false-starts in my quest for remote desktops in X... <blush/>
I don't know how many other people get this issue, but it comes up at my work a bit: Some co-worker asks me if I know of a tool to do such-and-such, and invariably I think “well, that's easy to do on Unix, but on Windows…”.
Then I remember Cygwin, and quickly find a Cygwin utility that does it, or can be scripted to do it with a small amount of work. So then co-worker asks if they can have a copy of this utility, and of course Cygwin is Free, so I say “sure, go download from www.cygwin.com.” Then they say, “yeah, but I don't want to install all of Cygwin, can't you just give me that one program?”
Well, the Cygwin command-line tools can be run from a Windows CMD.EXE shell, so this is quite possible to do. However, they all require the Cygwin POSIX layer, which at a minimum means I should also give them cygwin1.dll. But what other DLLs might the program use?
MJL2008-09-10T14:37+1000 Update: since this page gets a lot of hits, here's the quick answer: use cygcheck, i.e:
cygcheck grep
Find it under Happy hacker discovery #2. Keep reading if you're bored...
It is useful to have different versions of the JVM installed, for a number of reasons:
It is also useful to be able to quickly switch between installed JREs/JDKs depending on the task at hand.
If I'm hacking in Linux, the JPackage project provides a much nicer solution to this problem, and the Linux distro' I'm using (SUSE 10.0) uses JPackage. It'd be nice if there was an update-alternatives for Cygwin, but since there isn't I've come up with this hack.
When you first install cygwin and run bash, it'll usually display this error message:
Your group is currently "mkpasswd". This indicates that the /etc/passwd (and possibly /etc/group) files should be rebuilt. See the man pages for mkpasswd and mkgroup then, for example, run mkpasswd -l [-d] > /etc/passwd mkgroup -l [-d] > /etc/group Note that the -d switch is necessary for domain users.
This post was originally published at sinewalker.wordpress.com on 18 April 2006.
While I'm on the subject of Cygwin hacking, I discovered this man-page about the Cygwin X server: type man XWinrc and read about how you can hack your systray icon to include a little launcher menu for you favorite X clients 8)
This post was originally published at sinewalker.wordpress.com on 18 April 2006.
I don't know why I haven't ever got around to this, but here—finally—is a hack to have Cygwin only ever start one instance of emacs (especially important in cygwin, because Win32 does not appear to share program texts between processes… )