Hi there, My flatmate and I have been playing with creating a minimal install of cygwin-xfree. We culled files until we ended up with XWin.exe, a bunch of libraries, and a few fonts. We included also ttmkfdir.exe and mkfontdir.exe, so we can add more fonts later, and use the windows fonts.
My flatmate has also written a delphi app, which runs the XWin binary with some options you can set on a preferences screen. It needs a little more work, but is quite useable. It is currently built around our set-up, so will need to be modified to support a normal cygwin-xfree install. We have packaged the above using a setup program called Inno Setup, available at: http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php Currently the archive including installer and launcher program come to just under 2.5Mb, and installs to about 5.5Mb. There is much work I need to do on this, but I have exams for the next week so won't get much of a chance. One of my main concerns is that our current install modifies the registry keys used by cygwin, so installing it will break an existing setup (although is quite easy to fix, it is messy). If you do want to look at what we have so far, you can grab http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/bennolan/setup.exe and have a play. Note it is messy, as it will change cygwin's registry keys. TODO: Recompile cygwin1.dll to look in a different registry location, so we don't use the same location as cygwin. Currently our install modifies the cygwin registry keys, so will break an existing install. Win95 support. Not sure why it isn't going yet. Need to investigate more. Fonts included. To reduce size, we have the bare minimum fonts included, but it can use fonts from within windows. Fix the launcher program. Currently doesn't save and restore settings correctly from registry, doesn't let the user specify a font server, and has odd defaults for the XDMCP server to connect to :) Make sure uninstall removes /tmp/* and other files created. Include esd.exe from http://www.kiss.taihaku.sendai.jp/~fuji/product/20001127/ , so we can use sound. Perhaps recompile to use cygwin dlls rather than mingw32, and see if there is a later version somewhere than this :) It's a little noisy too, and buffered. Need to work out if there are any configuration parameters we can play with. Add license file to launcher program to say that it is GPL. What are the .a files? Are they linked from the .dlls? Are they used by XWin.exe, or is it just the .dlls? I created a sourceforge project yesterday for this to make it accessible, but uploaded anything to it yet. That will be a job for the week after next. Questions, comments, advice, etc? Cheers, Tim.