startxwin.exe is failing in cygwin 1.13.2.0 on Windows 7 with keyboard initialization failure

Question

My operating system is Windows 7. I installed cygwin. I wanted to start the XWin Server with the startxwin command and it terminates with the error:

 Couldn't open compiled keymap file /var/lib/xkb/server-0.xkm
(EE) XKB: Failed to load keymap. Loading default keymap instead.
(EE) Couldn't open compiled keymap file /var/lib/xkb/server-0.xkm
XKB: Failed to compile keymap
Keyboard initialization failed. This could be a missing or incorrect setup of xkeyboard-config.
Fatal server error: Failed to activate core devices.
Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file.
winDeinitMultiWindowWM - Noting shutdown in progress
startxwin: giving up
startxwin: unable to connect to X server: Connection refused
startxwin: server error

I already tried /usr/bin/rebaseall -v and it didn't solve the problem and gives the same error.

Could someone please help me overcome this problem?

Answer 1

• Verify that xkeyboard-config is correctly installed using cygcheck -c xkeyboard-config

• Check that /usr/bin/xkbcomp can be run from a bash shell. If that fails, see if cygcheck /usr/bin/xkbcomp reports any missing DLLs.

• Something is interfering with the ability of the X server to invoke xkbcomp to compile the keymap.

Possible causes:

• You have run Cygwin's setup program to do an update while some cygwin processes were running, and then clicked on the continue option in the "In-use files detected" dialog, and then tried to carry on using Cygwin without rebooting as advised by setup. Reboot.

• This is one of the symptoms of an application interfering with Cygwin's fork() emulation. See the main Cygwin FAQ question for a list of software which has been known to interfere with the correct operation of Cygwin.

• This also caused by DLLs with conflicting base addresses preventing Cygwin's fork() emulation from functioning correctly. Install the rebase package, read the README file /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/rebase-n.n.n.README, and follow the instructions there to run rebaseall. In short: stop all Cygwin processes (including services) and run rebaseall from an ash shell (not bash, which would open some DLLs, making them unwriteable) in a cmd.exe window.

Source: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/cygwin-x-faq.html#q-failed-to-compile-keymap