KDE on Cygwin: 2.2.2 Beta 1 Release Available

The KDE on Cygwin project, the project to port Qt and KDE to Windows, has announced the first beta release of KDE 2.2.2 for Cygwin and Cygwin/XFree86. At the moment they offer kdelibs and kdebase for download but it seems we can expect other packages like kdegames, kdepim and kdevelop in near future too.

Comments

by Raga (not verified)

Well, don't ask me why, but this is how I solved the bug:

1) create new user (root console: adduser )
2) successfully login as new user with kde3.2
3) open root console
4) rm /home/knoppix/.ICE* and .DCOP*
5) cp /home//.ICE* /home/knoppix/
same with .DCOP (only the file, not the link)
6) chown knoppix.knoppix /home/knoppix/.DCOP*
(same with .ICE*)

Instead of '*' I typed the key until match.

I hope this helps somebody after me - and that the causing error will be detected soon. Before this I had tried to change the access rights to these files (no success) and to delete them (no successful recreation).

by Alfonso fr (not verified)

This one worked for me in KUbuntu 8.04.1
Problem started upon reinstallation of Xsane followed by reboot.
Don't forget to delete the dumb user just created afterwards!

by Sebastian (not verified)

Maybe its not a direct reply but helpful in someways. After launching a kde session from kdm I get an error that the dcopserver could not be started. I am running the current debian/sarge. It seems that dcopserver is run as the same user login in. For locking purposes I believe it quite often occurs that application want to write to /tmp. So a user rights check gives me

drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 192 May 14 20:45 tmp

Okay so I add the sticky bit to /tmp via

# chmod u+t /tmp

Which gives me no solution. So I decide to change the rights to

# chmod 1777 /tmp

Which leaves me with

drwxrwxrwt 6 root root 192 May 14 20:45 tmp

And *whoa*: my login user can start dcopserver manually. Okay: Some people might say that I am digging a security whole and so on, but I do not want every user to write to their own ~/tmp directory but rather that my system gets back to work. Supposedly that package causing the trouble will be fixed one day *g. Hope that was of help

Sebastian

by Angel Sosa (not verified)

I am getting the same error message in addition I am also getting "kdeinit communication error.

by Yi-Kun Yang (not verified)

Got the same problem. I am running Fedora Core I with multiple computers accessing home directory at the same time. I removed ~/.ICEauthority-c and
~/.ICEauthority-l then it works fine.

by blackula (not verified)

I run KDE on fedoracore1 as well I am the only one logging on to my computer. If you remove ICEauth*c and ICEauth*l, it seems to fix the problem. This is a bug of some sort. But removing those two files always seems to fix my problem. I will see if a bug report has already been filed.

Blackula
Fedora Core 1

by blackula (not verified)

This seems to fix my problem on fedora core 1, hope it fixes yours.

Blackula
Fedora Core 1

by Joaquin Jose Escay (not verified)

I got the same problem and just renamed the ~/.ICEauthority-c and
~/.ICEauthority-l to ICEauthority-c and ICEauthority-l everything worked out from there.

thanks!

by Oli (not verified)

I got the same message when starting konsole.
I use Gnome as the desktop manager, but I do use konsole and konqueror because I like them.

I got the message about the DCOPServer not running when I started konsole.
So I chmod'ed ~/.ICEauthority to a+rw and this way it works like a charm.
ICEauthority was for some reason owned by root.root.

hth,
Oli

by zoline (not verified)

I installed cygwin with Kde3 on my note.
First time it worked, but After several setting, startx repeted followings..

_KDE_IceTransmkdir: Owner of /tmp/.ICE-unix should be set to root
iceauth: creating new authority file /home/?????/.ICEauthority
Could not load library! Trying exec....
DCOPServer self-test failed.
kdeinit: Launched DCOPServer, pid = 3736 result = 0
kdeinit: DCOPServer could not be started, aborting.
+ test -n ''
+ kwrapper ksmserver
Warning: connect() failed: : Connection refused
kdeinit: entering main
kdeinit: Warning, socket_file already exists!
KDEINIT_KIO_EXEC

I found that dcopserver couldn't find my home directory,
cause of my userid is korean using env LANG=ko_KR.EUC.
so i changed LANG to C.

Now it work fine..

by temp-join (not verified)

hi, I have encountered the similar problem when try to login KDE.
But have to clarify the point before explain the phenomenon,
that is: I have set the default shell as "tcsh" for my users and root.
default shell in REDHAT-7.3 is "bash".
in order to start kde, the only way for me is setting default shell back.
then problem is gone.
actually, I am used to work with tcsh,not familiar with bash.
For the more depth reason, should be solved by linux-developer.
hope help.

by alex cox (not verified)

I think this happens when you are logged into linux as an ordinary, su to root and then use /sbin/shutdown instead of logging out in the conventional way (at least that's what has happened to me.

In the past, as root, I have solved this problem by creating a symbolic link thus:

ln ~/.DCOPserver_localhost.localdomain__0 /home/alex/.DCOPserver_localhost.localdomain__0

This link will be readable by ordinary users by default.

I'm not sure this is strictly speaking the proper solution but in the past it has worked. I came here to see if I could find anything better but I don't like the idea of messing around with those files, as mentioned above, so I will now try this again.

by alex cox (not verified)

Yes, it worked for me fine.

by Darren (not verified)

may be a bit late but I fixed it this way after trying many other suggestions here.

If you delete ~/.ICEauthority file(make a back up just in case) and restart your session. This did it for me. Not sure what the problem was though.

by YOUR FRIEND GURU (not verified)

please, REMOVE the f#$%&/ spaces from your HOSTNAME="DONOTUSESPACESHERE"

it works.

cheers,
~your friendly nearby guru

p.s. paranoid is a noob =)

by Brian (not verified)

My situation was that I could start KDE as root, but not as any other user. Having read this thread there seemed to be a common theme; this being the permissions of certain files and the ability to read/write from/to the user's home directory.

In order to facilitate sharing between my windows and linux partitions I had formatted my home partition as FAT32 so I could read in both. However, it does not seem possible (certainly not easy) to set permissions on a FAT32 drive. So even though I mounted my user as both the owner and group for the drive (in fstab) and had given everyone full rwx permissions on the entire drive, KDE still had problems accessing it in the way it needed. I reformatted the drive as EXT3, created a new user and KDE launched without a problem as a normal user (this makes sense because root's home was on my root partition which is EXT3). In summary:

1) PROBLEM: As a normal user with a home directory on a FAT32 drive (this follows for any file system where you cannot set permissions I suppose) I was getting a DCOPServer error when booting KDE and KDE and X would crash to the command line (however X itself would start).

2) SOLUTION: I reformatted the partion where I had mounted my users' home directory as EXT3, deleted the old users and recreated them (with their home's on the EXT3 drive) and KDE started without a problem.

by Ken Banks (not verified)

This problem has been plaguing me for a while now, but I finally squelched it.

FIRST let me clarify how I was seeing these same errors:
I would connect to a server using VNC as a normal user. From there I would su as root and start a Konsole. After this, I would begin to see these errors everytime I attempted to start a Konqeror, or just about any other command that I typed into the Konsole. I basically could get anywhere from there even though I was root.

SOLUTION: As root, I could, however, remove ~/.DCOP*, then I closed out my Konsole session and simply performed another 'su' to start another Konsole. Everything has worked fine ever since. Somewhere along the way, these ~/.DCOP* files had gotten corrupted after a server crash, I think, and couldn't be corrected, until I completely removed them. I hope this helps!

Ken Banks

by pingu (not verified)

The solution is to change the hostname in the next FILES:
/etc/hostname
/etc/hosts
/etc/mailname
/etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig

The hostname can't contain special symbols, like space,....

by Ali Ayoub (not verified)

try adding this line on top of $HOME/.vnc/xstartup
"""
ICEAUTHORITY="$HOME/.ICEauthority"
"""

by jim (not verified)

i just ran into this using kde on aix.

i finally tracked MY problem down to laziness on my part.
i am using dhcp on this install, and after i successfully
got an ip address, i added it to /etc/hosts with my machine's
name (this machine will pretty much be up all the time and
i don't expect the ip address to change).

so i added:
x.x.x.x myname

but i really needed to add a fully qualified name as well,
so i changed the line to:
x.x.x.x myname myname.fully.qualified.com

that fixed it.

by roilan panaligan (not verified)

my computer system open its windows but no applications because of the DCOPServer is not running. Thank you

by Joshua Lokken (not verified)

This is addressed to those who are complaining that KDE/Cygwin is preventing 'Windows users' from 'converting' to *NIX: Do you really think that the people trying Cygwin are 'Windows users', or folks who use *NIX whenever possible, but are constrained to a Windows box at work, etc.? The latter, I think, for the most part. Also, what do you think the rate is at which people are 'converting to *NIX?' Probably not very high. In fact, mr./mrs. *NIX user, I would bet you have a Windows box available most of the time, don't you now? It's just not cut-and-dried. I was introduced to PCs about 2 years ago, and placed in front of a WinNT box. Not everyone's dream, right? A couple of months later, we upgraded to Win2k, and then I decided to check out *NIX. I got a copy of FreeBSDs latest release, and dove in. I now use *NIX and Windows at work and at home. Anyway, long story short, while I prefer FreeBSD to the Microsoft OSs I've used, I would bet my story is alot more 'common' than you might think. People use what gets the job done. No one strictly buys Ford or Chevy [and nothing else] anymore.

KDE Cygwin is a 'good idea.'

Thanks,

Joshua Lokken

by Simon Heinzle (not verified)

You're right -- it's not just that black and white, sometimes you have to use windows, there is no way around it -- but for productiveness I choose (and like) *nix.

Thanks you all folks creating a nicer Windows :)

by Radiantmatrix (not verified)

Excellent points, it's about time someone said it. I've been getting *really* annoyed by all the people who think ports of popular Free software are somehow hurting the use of Free OSes. The logic I've heard goes like this:

* User can get all the Free tools they want on Windows
* User figures "I have no compelling reason to switch to $FREE_OS"

It's crap. I think it goes more like this:

* User thinks $FREE_OS isn't worth it
* User finds lots of Free tools that work very well on Windows, but are ports of tools created on $FREE_OS
* User starts to think $FREE_OS might be very good, since they had all these tools a lot sooner.

I've seen that first-hand. My father-in-law is a Windows user. Frustrated with IE, he tried Firefox and loved it. As he's an astronomy buff, I pointed him at Celestia, which he enjoys immensely. Audacity helped him with his LP -> CD project. OpenOffice saved him $400 when he needed to generate documents at home for consumtion at work.

Suddenly, he realized that *every computing need he has* is being filled by OpenSource software. Why, then, was he paying for Windows? He's now in the process of converting entirely to Linux. I doubt he would have made the effort to change everything about his work habits at once: and doing things like porting KDE to Windows gives people the chance to "fall back" easily when the learning curve slows their work.

Kudos on this project, and never let anyone tell you this is harming the Free OS community: those people are clueless about how people make decisions.

by Kumar Kanagarajah (not verified)

I initially got into Linux after having headaches working with a Windows 2k server. As a server Linux works like a charm, however I still need Windows on my work PC because of some custom Windows apps which my company use. Cygwin lets me have a little bit of Linux on my machine where otherwise it would had only been Windows

by 134xt3r (not verified)

Most of you guys here are saying that the only reason you need windows is that a few select apps only work in MS Windows. Have you guys heard of wine? It's practically like Cygwin in reverse, by that I mean it allows you to install windows apps on *Nix. I was really impressed by it and thought I should share my experiences. I think it would be funny if someone managed to get the windows desktop interface and ported it to *nix. Wine Homepage

134xt3r.

by Marty Chapman (not verified)

I am very new to the Open Source arena, however, I know a good thing when I see it. My honest feeling is that all the bashers on porting KDE to Windows are not thinking clearly. They just have some unresolved issues and hatred toward Microsoft. The truth be told, the more Unix/Linux like OS/Applications ported to Microsoft Windows proves its power and flexibility, though somewhat still in its infancy.

KDE on Cygwin will be very rewarding in the years to come. Free Software, I believe, is slowly gaining wide acceptance in areas where Microsoft compatible applications are the standard. How wide spread is this? I can't say. However, KDE on Cygwin has/will open many opportunities for KDE application software developed under the Free Software umbrella. As more Free Software applications become more stable, you can be sure Microsoft applications will still exist and used by many, but will slowly be overlooked more and more when the price of productivity applications is the driving force.

KDE on Cygwin will/is the portal by which Free Software will become common place. Microsoft's (and its employees) only advantage is it had a head start on the Free Software community by many years, however, the Free Software advantage will be that of free software supporters from around the globe.

=>TTFN<=

by Arkain (not verified)

It's a good idea to have GNU/Linux (since most of the tools are gnu) tools available for linux. They offer a few more options in the face of a closed, high-priced market to those of us on tight budget. To that end, I can definitely understand and appreciate the intentions. My one concern about this is that this maneuver may be bit premature. I can't help but wonder how the good but sometimes buggy apps that I love to use in linux will react with Windows when they crash. Think about it. An application that's 70% running on a developing environment that's still very much under construction, all on top of an operating system that at its most stable still acts as though it's ony 85% complete and not application fault tolerant; to me, that's a scarey thought.

IMHO, KDE developers should focus on making existing applications as useful and as stable as possible on LINUX before attempting to port them onto the unstable M$ OS. Consider the implications for a moment. If anything about the use of this project becomes problematic, that gives Microsoft supporters ammo with which to attack Linux, allowing them the opportunity to claim that if it's not stable under Windows, then it's not stable under Linux. This doesn't need to be true for them to claim it and for those considering a transition to Linux to believe it.

i know kde but i don't know how to install linux programs on cygwin. i have redhat 9 and am getting fedora soon but i don't have anywhere to put them so i'm left with cygwin.