SUMMARY: OLVWM doesn't work on certain machines

From: Himanshu Gohel (gohel@rad.usf.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 06 1993 - 13:01:02 CDT


Thank you to all who replied to my problem about olvwm mysteriously
not working on two machines out of all our machines. Specifically:

j.farringdon@psychol.ucl.ac.uk (Jonny Farringdon)
Brett B. Doehr <doehr@magellan.den.mmc.com>
"David W. Abbott" <dwa@ossi.com>
Andre Eickler <eickler@glenfiddich.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>

The solution:
------------

I replaced the existing .xinitrc with a skeleton .xinitrc file to
see if all the commands in that were executed. Turns out that
they were not, and OpenWindows 3.0 was using the defaults script
in $OPENWINHOME/lib to fire up 'olwm.'

So I checked the $OPENWINHOME/bin/openwin script to see exactly
what commands were being used to fire up the window manager.
Turns out that there is this chunk of code in the script:`

# If the user doesn't have a .xinitrc and they haven't specified an alternate
# one via XINITRC, then set XINITRC to the system default Xinitrc
if [ ! -f $HOME/.xinitrc -a -z "${XINITRC}" ]; then
        XINITRC=$OPENWINHOME/lib/Xinitrc
        export XINITRC
fi

which indicates that the only reason why the user's personal
.xinitrc file would *not* be executed was if there was a
$XINITRC env variable which pointed somewhere else. So I checked
the value, and lo and behold, on those two machines, it was
set to $OPENWINHOME/lib/Xinitrc!

So I simply removed the 'setenv XINTRC $OPENWINHOME/lib/Xinitrc'
from the system default cshrc file, and now it reads the .xinitrc
file from the user's home directory.

Misc:

----

It was also suggested that olvwm doesn't like the -syncpid option on startup, but that seems to work ok for our site, and had nothing to do with the problem that we had.

--- Himanshu Gohel, gohel@rad.usf.edu Center for Engineering and Medical Image Analysis (CEMIA), U of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620



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