RE: tlug: inittab question + Caldera

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com> writes:

    Jim> Hi all, On 12-Jan-98 Jim Schweizer wrote:
    >> I haven't been able to find where fvwm is coming from.

    Jim> Okay, I found it - /usr/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc

    Jim> So I guess booting to X isn't a good idea if you have a lot
    Jim> of users with different window managers.

Actually, even the default `startx' and `xinitrc' scripts allow a
substantial amount of user flexibility.  I believe that startx looks
for resources in four different places, two of which are user
configurable.  I forget what happens with xinit.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to trace the execution path
through the scripts.  The documentation is invariably skimpy and often
wrong.  (Sure, the MIT man page for `xinit' will tell you everything
there is to know about `xinit', but that doesn't tell you much about
_your_ system because most of what you are interested in is in the
various xinitrc files, which are shell scripts and thus can do
ANYTHING.)

The problem arises because X has always been a hacker's system.  Power
users and system administrators have been used to creating complicated
initialization configurations and startup scripts.  On the other hand,
most users have always been intimidated by the configuration process,
and "better" interfaces are continuously under development.  However,
those interfaces must be backwards compatible with the old methods, or 
the power users and even system admins won't use them.  This leads to 
great confusion since there isn't a standard way to deal with
initialization.

You mentioned being the "only TLUGer still using Slackware".  One of
the historical problems with Slackware, which may or may not have been
addressed in recent revisions, was its failure to specify "the"
interface to these complicated systems.  Debian and RedHat both have
made efforts to make the interface consistent.  I don't know the X
server initialization process that well, but I do know a little about
the configuration of the X user environment.

One problem with the evolving user environment configuration of X is
that it's not entirely backward compatible.  For example, for any
given Xt xprogram there is an app-defaults/XProgram resource file.
But this is overridden by any user resources, which can be set in
~/.Xdefaults (not read if anything later in this list is available),
or ~/.Xdefaults-<host> (not if later is avail), or in a particular
root window property (WM_SYSTEM_RESOURCES or something like that,
usually set using `xrdb ~/.Xresources').  So if you had a ~/.Xdefaults
and the system switched to the root window property method, your
configuration will suddenly just disappear.

What Debian (and RedHat, which I believe uses modified Debian scripts,
or did circa 4.x) did is to arrange that all of these are more or less 
equivalent, by for example linking ~/.Xdefaults to ~/.Xresources and
making sure that all the startup scripts do `xrdb ~/.Xresources' at an 
appropriate point.  (Why would a new Debian user have an ~/.Xdefaults
file if that interface is deprecated?  For one, lots of program docs
say "put `prog*resource: value' in your ~./Xdefaults".)  Also, the
xinitrc scripts are all linked to the new method Xsession, which is
used by both xdm and xinit on Debian systems.  I guess this isn't true 
on Slackware.

This doesn't work 100%, as there are subtle differences among the
methods.  But it helps a lot.
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