I just got burned by the Cygwin X11R7.4 update and I find the official mailing lists hostile and clunky. So I thought I'd ask here.
If you have survived the upgrade (or at least made progress on fixing things), what steps did you take to make things work?
This upgrade splits bits of the X Window System into separate packages. For instance, if you need fonts, you'll need to install those when you run the Cygwin setup program. There's no easy answer for which ones you'll need, but beyond the space used, there's no reason not to get more than you need. I added everything that seemed even remotely useful.
If you've done anything with the startx script, I'm sorry to say you'll have to redo that work. Note that this bites people who followed the advice at the top of that script: "Site administrators are STRONGLY urged to write nicer versions." (Yes, I should have used source control and yes, I should not blindly upgrade Cygwin, but who would have thought the install process would be dramatically altered from one release to the next. And why couldn't the install save off a copy for me?)
For me, the shortcut in the Windows Start menu worked better than running startx from a command line because the default configuration is much closer to what I used in the past. Note that startxwin.bat assumes you've installed Cygwin in \cygwin, which may or may not be correct. Check that first if the shortcut flashes a console window and quietly fails.
Update: I've now decided that startxwin.sh is the version of the startup script I like best. I starts X with the -multiwindow and only launches one xterm. Unlike startxwin.bat, it does not make any potentially erroneous assumptions about where Cygwin has been installed so it doesn't need to be edited each time it's upgraded.
Initially, the number lock key was screwed up, but it seems to have been resolved when I did a another update.
At some point, the default for startx has changed from rootless/multiwindow to the single-window option that Cygwin used years ago.
Yuck! I presume this was related to updating the world to use X.org stuff instead of the old XFree86/X11, or whatever it was. Whatever the reason, it's mind-bogglingly annoying! I suppose in someone's point of view, it's "right," and I may like it some day. I think I already like some of what I'm seeing as I investigate this: manpages are being updated, and seem fairly clear.
I still want to run startx, for the time being. I don't want to run a .bat script, I don't want to run a custom script.
startx starts up X by means of the process described in the xinitrc package. According to this process, you can create a .xserverrc file in your home directory to control the server process that is started up, including its command-line arguments. (You can also specify on the startx command-line, apparently.) The correct thing to do seems to be to put the following in $HOME/.xserverrc :
exec XWin -multiwindow -clipboard -silent-dup-error
You still probably want to create a .xinitrc to control what gets start up within your session. I don't like the way one xterm becomes the long-running process which causes the X session to terminate when I exit, but at the moment I can't remember what I do to correct that situation, and don't have any examples to look at here.