next up previous contents
Next: Customising the scripts Up: Customising the scripts Previous: Actions performed by

Setting of the X11 environment

 

In order to set up the X11 environment, you must understand how the X session is controlled. Figure 2 illustrates the possible behaviours you can get from the customisation of the xsession.

  
Figure 2: Model of the HEP_Xsession

The X11 environment provides a reasonable working default to the user through the so-called HEPiX Desktop (to be compared with the COSE/CDE, HP-VUE etc. desktops).

Although the session management is still poor, this setting is a way to solve resources problems caused by the too heavy COSE/CDE, HP-VUE, etc. desktops. It will evolve with the technology and might enable in the future a real X11R6 session manager (OK, this is one reason why it is "beta" as well!!).

Through the so-called Major Switches it is easy to customise the session at the user level or for a machine, a site, a group of users, etc. in the same way as it is possible with the HEPiX shell scripts.

There is a way to control what is and is not allowed.

The major switch is the key idea for the customisation of the X11 environment. After a 4 months collaboration between CERN and DESY we finally managed to understand how a theoretical X session should be decomposed, and then we found a flexible way to handle this environment.

You can then control the session with the following Major Switches:

                 HX_WM            # the window manager: fvwm, mwm, etc.
                 HX_DESKTOP       # the desktop: CDE, HP-VUE, DXSESSION,HEPIX
                 HX_STARTUP       # the startup script: .xsession, 
                                  # HEP_xsession.default
                 HX_LAST_CLIENT   # the control or last client of the session
                                  # adam, xterm, window-manager, etc.
                 HX_ROOT_WINDOW   # the command which sends a root window
                                  # on your screen
                 HX_KEYBOARD      # the name of an xmodmap file
                 HX_SOURCEPROFILE # do you want to source your
                                  # user profile files or not 
                                  # (might be dangerous because of stty's)

Once the HEPiX scripts are installed have a look at the file

       /usr/local/lib/hepix/templates/xprofile
Table 3 tells you that if you customise a file /etc/hepix/xprofile you can specify what is the default window manager for this system. You can even specify that for this or that value of HX_VENDOR you want this or that window manager.

You can specify which are the clients which are started at the beginning of the session in the file /etc/hepix/xclients.

You can specify mandatory clients with the file /etc/hepix/xclients.m which will be executed even if the user or the group levels don't want it (so be careful when you set such a file)!

Don't forget that you can use the tool /usr/local/lib/hepix/tools/Xinfo to determine some characteristics of Xservers connecting to your system and the uco -X11 command provides a menu which offers you the possibility to fake the session. It produces a log file in $HOME/.hepix/xsession.log and you can use this output to understand what would happen for users' sessions when they connect to your system.

As usual root, all users with uid less than 100, and users listed in /etc/hepix/list- don't get the HEPiX X11 scripts but get what was provided by the vendor of your system. Although you may not have the vendor default login panel, if you login as root.

If they are detected, PC Xservers will have a special setting if these are Windows based Xservers.. Indeed HX_WM=local, because they are going to use Windows as a window manager which optimises the resources and integrates very well with Microsoft Windows. Of course if you prefer fvwm, then you can specify it.

The new assignments of port numbers are respected; the HEPiX scripts append a fontpath from the port 7100 of your XFontServers which you can specify in a list /etc/hepix/font-servers for example:
      xtsoft1
      xtsoft2
The HEPiX-X11 customisation of xdm doesn't set MAGIC-COOKIE although the installation procedures gives some hints on how to do this. There are many reasons for not doing it with the HEPiX scripts and the best one is that, it is probably not the HEPiX scripts' role to setup the security (This is a very "system" level thing to do and requires some checks on some directories, etc. ).

Keep in mind that:
1
HEPiX X11 has been designed to cooperate with MAGIC-COOKIE and even an xhost - is started in the preliminary tasks of the session.
2
it is recommended that you enable it.

It is possible that in the future the installation procedure installs this feature. At CERN, an xauth feature of the SUE project will do it and will be effective by the end of 1995.



next up previous contents
Next: Customising the scripts Up: Customising the scripts Previous: Actions performed by



Arnaud Taddei
Tue Dec 12 08:15:58 MET 1995