Re: SEUL: SEUL duplicating efforts?

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

> There is nothing wrong with a user using startx at least until he can
> be confident in using xdm.  The problem now is than many distributions
> let the user figure out how to start X (and some just type X and get a
> suprise), the user must get a welcome message telling him about startx.
> 

There's a good idea : a special /etc/motd file. 

Another ( nutty?? what do you guys think of this one ? ) idea is to use
some menu-based shell as a default. Away
to make things user friendly in a non graphical environment. Possibly.
That way, they just have to pick the "start X Windows" menu item and don't
even have to remember 'startx'. Then you could have a menu somewhere that
allows the user to pick a default color depth, enable X-authentication,
chose a configuration file, and "change back to default settings" (in case
they mess something up and can't work out how to fix it.) To deal with xdm
?? simply put it on top of the root menu shell (which presumably has a few
extra goodies added to it) and recommend that XDM be used if the display
is configured correctly. There's no obvious need to have XDM fire up at
boot time ...


Also, the menu shell would mean that the newbies would have something to
fall back on when X fails. One thing to think about is that especially on
the notebook computers, X WIndows often fails. The idea of relying too
heavily on X working at the drop of the hat seems mildly risky at best. In
contrast, a menu shell would be more dependable. (I've never seen a linux
install fail to get the console working !!!  )

Now I want to mention startx:

there's still probs with it, in particular, it doesn't allow you to start
more than one display, and it doesn't deal with X-authentication. The
latter in particular is extremely easy to fix. The former is really not a
major problem, just a limitation which can be fixed, since all the startx
script really does is generate arguments to pass to the xinit command,
which doesn't suffer from these limitations. 

I just have these dark
memories of my newbie days, almost going mad because exmh spat out error
messages and I had no idea how to do X-athentication (and couldn't
understand the man pages !!! <-" ) 

So if startx is used at all, I highly recommend hacking it. It actually
starts out with a comment saying that it needs to be hacked.
Unfortunately, your market aren't going to stand a chance in hell of
editing the script. 

JM$0.02

-- Donovan