note to self....

A couple interesting notes about Cygwin, X, and SSH, today.

Problem 1: The BadWindow X-client Crash

First off, we had a problem with Gnu Emacs (not Xemacs or other, non-Gnu Emacs - don't know if the problem exists with others) and Cygwin X when the Emacs was running on a remote host and displaying on the X-server of a local workstation. The X server is Cygwin's, and the remote Emacs is installed on a Linux system. The connection was mude using OpenSSH.

As it turns out, this is a problem between SSH and X, not (as was first suspected) a problem with the Window Manager or Cygwin-X / Windows interaction. It is not an Emacs problem either, and from the reports we found on the Inernet concerning this, it is not unique to Gnu Emacs under X, either. That is, this could affect any X application - not sure why it doesn't appear to affect XTerm, but it may be because the Emacs was run as a child process of the XTerm.

The Workstation has:

* Windows 2000 Professional Workstation
* Cygwin
* X (x11.org)
* FVWM
* Gnu Emacs
* OpenSSH


Fix for Problem 1:

Found a fix (together with a description of the problem) in a posting on RedHat.com support site.

The post there suggests a fix involving a change to the change to the SSH configuration files, which we were loathe to do, so we (using arcane knowledge gained from intense study of manual pages) opted for the alternative solution (which occurs further down in the post, from a later response to it) - which suggestion is to use the -Y parameter to ssh instead of the -X parameter as was tradtional.

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