[rescue] X startup

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, April 4, 2002 at 00:30:34 (-0500), Sheldon T. Hall wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] X startup
>
> No Solaris blivet, no buttons with login choices, etc.  Just name and
> password queries in a black Italic font on a white background.

Ah -- that sounds like you're getting a plain un-vendor-ised xdm login
screen....  or maybe all the xdm configs were lost....

Hopefully some other Solaris user can give some hint as to how this
could happen....  It's been a long time since I even just used X11 from
a Sun, probably back in 2.3 or 2.4 days....  *BSD is my domain these days.

> > The login process is handled by XDM (or whatever it's called under>
> > SunOS-5.7)

A wee bit more poking around on a Solaris server I have access to
suggests "dtlogin" is what's supposed to provide your login screen if
you're using CDE, and it more or less takes the place of "xdm" in the
standard MIT X11 distribution.

> OK, but what starts that?

Something in an /etc/rc.?/S* script

maybe /etc/rc.?/S99dtlogin

(it's not enabled on the server I have access to and just lives only in
/etc/init.d/dtlogin)

> I don't think I've made any changes in any of that stuff since the last time
> it worked.  Certainly, I haven't _meant_ to change anything.

I don't know exactly how fancy dtwm gets but I do know that many modern
window managers write stuff to their own configuration files sometimes
even saving session related information so they can start the same apps
up again.

But do check the timestamps on all the possibly related files you can
find in your home directory.  "man dtwm" will give you a list of other
files to check too.

You might also try creating a test user-id with a default profile,
etc. and see if you can login as that user....

However with dtlogin either screwed up, or somehow having been replaced
by the plain old xdm, your problem may lie higher up in the system and
not in any configs in your home directory.

> The thing that galls me is that it worked flawlessly before we moved, and
> the _only_ intentional difference in the network setup is that the router is
> now at the normal ".1" address instead of ".3".  I changed that in all the
> relevant places, though.

I would agree that's unlikely to be the problem.  Xterms generally get
by fine without even knowing the default route for a subnet as
everything they talk to is generally on the same subnet.....

> Maybe if I could find a reference outlining the startup steps it's going
> through, I could find out what's broken.

I can tell you exactly how a generic Xterm (eg. the Xterminal package
for making diskless sun workstations into "Xterms") or an NCD,
etc. works with the standard X11R6 (or XFree86) install, but those Sun
guys have done some hacking about and have created custom versions of
some of the related programs, and of course CDE adds more of its own
too.  Meanwhile IIRC lots of the original programs are also still
available.  (Back when I used SunOS-4 I always installed the standard
MIT X11 distributions, especially for supporting Xterminals.)

Here's an overview of that process for the standard MIT X11:

Xdm runs as a daemon to accept requests from Xterminals, forking a child
to manage a remote terminal when it gets one.  There are several
variants of how this proceeds, and sometimes initially a "chooser"
program is run to allow you to select which host you want to login to,
or maybe a default host is selected by the xdm configuration and it
immediately opens an authentication widget (i.e. the X login "window")
on the Xterminal.  Once a user enters a correct user-id and password then a
pair of script are run to setup the user's session and to run some
default clients (such as the window manager, maybe an xterm, clock,
etc.).  The default Xsession script in the MIT distribution runs the
user's ~/.xsession script, if there is one, and otherwise just loads
resources from ~/.Xresources (if there is one), then starts twm and an
xterm.  When you close/exit that initial xterm then the script
terminates and you're logged out.  I suspect the Solaris startup runs
dtwm as the last program it starts, then waits for it to exit.  That's
more or less what I do when I customise a standart X11 install -- I run
the window manager in the foreground and arrange to have a "logout"
entry in its main function menu which causes it to exit.

"man dtlogin" (and followups with the other manuals it references) might
tell you more than you ever wanted to know about how it all works (or is
supposed to work! :-) on Solaris....

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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