RE: Cygwin Installation Problems on Windows Vista (killing sh.exe helps)

Dave Korn wrote:

On 19 September 2007 16:42, lent wrote:
Hi Dave, thanks for the quick reply.

Sorry, but I wasn't able to find the solution you refer to for the problem of setup.exe hanging in Windows Vista.  Where can I find it?

>> For getting the installation to keep going, killing off an sh.exe process
>> via
>> Task Manager's End Process, moves things along.  This also seems to need to
>> be done for "texf" (I think that was the name) package.

>  Hell, you can make the whole thing "move along" even better, by simply
>killing 'setup.exe' instead of sh.exe.  Sure, it may not be correct, but at
>least it's fast, eh?

>  Or you could wait for it to finish doing whatever vital job it was doing.
>Your choice.

>> At least we get to the final setup screen this way :-)

>  Works my way too, *and* with the added advantage you don't end up with a
>semi-broken installation.

I'm new to the cygwin development community and would love to chase this problem down and resolve it once and for all.  Is there a way to log the shell scripts as they are run from setup.exe?

On the "semi-broken installation":
Actually, the problem was that the "whatever vital job" that /etc/postinstall/gnuplot.sh was doing
never completed.  30 minutes of wait time by multiple Vista users on multiple brands of spanking new
laptops indicates some sort of interaction bug of these shell scripts (or the programs they run) with the "wonders" of Vista.

This "hang at 99% forever" symptom persists even with setting the Properties of
setup.exe to run in "Windows XP(SP2)" compatibility mode.

It's a very disappointing installation experience for novice programmers.

Our XP and Windows 2000 users do not have these problems as setup.exe completes just fine.

Do I want to kill any part of a carefully crafted installation process? Of course not :-)

The problem is if the user kills setup.exe, they wind up with a more broken installation, and lack the Cygwin Desktop icon  and the Cygwin Start Menu entry. Killing sh.exe (hopefully the right one) moves the installation process past the block of /etc/postinstall/gnuplot.sh.  

Our reason for using Cygwin is to teach young engineering students about C programming in a command line environment.  If they can't install it on their brand new laptop, I have a difficult time having them use it :-)

Thanks again for your attention to this annoying bug.
Chris Lent

>    cheers,
>      DaveK