Monday, August 17, 2009

Problem running startxwin.bat in Cygwin/X on windows

Nowadays more and more graphical tools like jconsole , jvisualvm are shipped with java and several other tools like tda-Thread Dump Analyzer , IBM HeapAnalyzer , etc are available for download to analyze and debug problems, hence it seems like you need to have some kind of graphical terminal like Xserver or VNC to manage your environment. Since most of the production environments are UNIX/Linux based and more commonly connected through windows desktop, you might need to have a windows based Xserver or VNC client. VNC Servers are not very common in the enterprise as they deemed to be insecure compared to X and needed additional installation and configuration while X comes with the OS. One such windows based open source free XServer is Cygwin/X which i decided to give it a try and ran into some problems before i made it to work, hence i wanted to write about it to avoid the same problem by someone else. The installer is little different where it lists you different packages of Cygwin along with Cygwin/X packages so you just need to select X11 if that's what you needed.



Once installed you just have to goto the c:\cygwin\bin in a cmd prompt and run startxwin.bat ,which should start the Xserver, but i my case the batch file was giving some issues,

startxwin.bat - Starting on Windows NT/2000/XP/2003'c:\cygwin\bin\run' is not recognized as an internal or external command,operable program or batch file.'c:\cygwin\bin\run' is not recognized as an internal or external command,operable program or batch file.

So in order to make it work i had to change the one line in the startxwin.bat file as shown below,

SET RUN=%CYGWIN_ROOT%\bin\run -p /usr/bin

replace with,

SET RUN=run -p /usr/bin

Now you should be able to connect with your favorite SSH client like putty or secureCRT with X11 Forwarding.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You could just open the bash shell and run: xwin -multiwindow

Still need to run xhost + to allow incoming X.

You can also try Xming. Xserver without all the Cygwin bloat (although I prefer Cygwin for the linux exe's you get with it and you never need the windows cmd line again)

Or you can run a light version of linux w/X11 installed via vmware player.

I've encountered some errors when trying to do some Rational/Eclipse based installs over ssh to CygwinX.

IBM had some technotes on it.