Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!POSEUR.JPL.NASA.GOV!earle
From: earle@POSEUR.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle - Sun JPL on-site Software Support)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Using the X logo under xdm problem
Message-ID: <8910170908.AA27420@poseur.jpl.nasa.gov>
Date: 17 Oct 89 09:08:03 GMT
Sender: root@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 28

I decided to run xdm on my Sun386i/150 (R3, all 10 fixes, Purdue 2.0 + 2.1,
gcc 1.36), just for fun.  It worked just fine until I noticed that there's
a little code chunk in clients/xdm/greet.c that is supposed to also put up
a 100x100 X logo widget in the bottom right corner.  It is bracketed by
`#ifdef DRAWLOGO'.  Since it more or less replicated the code that tosses
the Login widget on the screen, and I thought it would add a little pizzazz,
I took the plunge and re-compiled greet.c and xdm with `-DDRAWLOGO'.

The result was that the Login widget never appeared; the 4 keyboard LEDs
keep cyclically flashing, the X cursor occasionally disappears/reappears,
and sometimes the whole screen even goes blank (!).  In short, it didn't
work, and I got the impression that the xdm sessions were constantly dying,
and I was seeing new ones re-spawned constantly, thus leading to screen chaos.
I certainly wasn't prepared to witness such havoc from 6 or so little lines of
code ... (and, btw, /usr/lib/X11/xdm/xdm-errors left no trace at all)

Does this sound like a reasonable explanation for the observed behavior?
If so, any ideas as to why this freakout is occuring?  It's awfully hard to
debug, since I am running xdm at the end of /etc/rc and I have no spare
terminal to plug in (and thus have to abort the machine to the PROM to stop
the cyclical carnage).  I went back to no logo, but it sure made me curious ...

	- Greg Earle
	  earle@poseur.JPL.NASA.GOV

Disclaimer: I have enough problems with my employer as it is without you 
	    deciding that I am speaking for them, so don't even try to ...
	    These are my own thoughts and opinions only!