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cygwin and blackbox 0.70.1

Here is a step to step guide to get blackbox working with cygwin.

Firstly you should have cygwin and xorg-x11 too. You should check the default xserver works. I.e you should be able to start a xterm. Once you have that we can concentrate on getting blackbox installed.

Download blackbox-0.70.1.tar.bz2

Extract

tar -xvjf blackbox-0.70.1.tar.gz -C /

Edit ~/.xinitrc and add blackbox to your the file. In my case this is the only line in my file.

blackbox

Edit /usr/X11R6/bin/startx

defaultserverargs="-multiwindow -clipboard"

to

defaultserverargs="-clipboard"

Fire it up and you should see this

Blacbox WM 0.70.1

Warning: I had to disable Unicode fonts in blackbox to get it working with cygwin. I have no idea why, but if blackbox tries to use unicode fonts all you get is boxes instead of the correct font renderings.

2 Responses to “cygwin and blackbox 0.70.1”

  1. Delmania Says:

    “I had to disable Unicode fonts in blackbox to get it working with cygwin”

    I feel stupid. How do you do this? I’ve looked everywhere.

  2. neilwightman Says:

    I had to change line 161 in lib/Unicode.cc file.

    mine now reads
    static bool has_unicode = false;

    I.e the block looks like this.

    bool bt::hasUnicode() {
      static bool has_unicode = false; 
      static bool done = false;
    
      if (done)
        return has_unicode;
    

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