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How to install ratpoison with Cygwin

Date: July 16, 2007 | Tags: cygwin, ratpoison, softwaretools | 3 Comments

Running the minimalist ratpoison window manager with Cygwin/X works. You will need to install the following Cygwin packages:

gcc-core
make
readline
xorg-x11-base
xorg-x11-devel

Here is how to install:

Download ratpoison

$ tar xvfz ratpoison-1.4.2.tar.gz
$ cd ratpoison-1.4.2
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

Put the following lines in your startxwin.bat file (and remove the other old %RUN% commands):
```
%RUN% XWin -rootless -clipboard -silent-dup-error
%RUN% /usr/local/bin/ratpoison
```
Run the startxwin.bat file

UPDATE 11/08/2007:

When I installed this the first time, I had no problems. The second time I installed, after getting a new PC, I got the following error message when running configure:

configure: error: *** Can't find X11 headers and libs

I thought the reason was because I forgot to install the xorg-x11-devel package which contains the X11 headers. But even after installing it, I still got the same error. I could not figure out the reason why configure was not finding the headers and libs. So after searching the GNU autoconf manual, I found a way to specify the X11 headers and libs on the command line.

./configure --x-includes=/usr/X11R6/include/X11/ --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib/

This did the trick. I'm not sure why it worked the first time and not the second time. See the GNU Autoconf manual for more information about the configure script.

See also Cygwin, X, ratposoin, screen, rxvt setup

3 Comments — Comments feed for this post

#1 PETERV commented on 2008-02-03:

I ran the install and made the changes to the startwinx.bat file, but there is no ratpoison file in the /usr/local/bin directory. Can someone tell me what directory I should be in when I run the install script?

#2 sofeng commented on 2008-02-03:

peterv:
I'm not sure why it didn't work. You should be in your untarred ratpoison directory when you run "make install".

#3 Robert commented on 2008-08-14:

You need to include 'make' package to that list since the default cygwin install doesn't include that.

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