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From: baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM (Steven L. Baur)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Should login xterms show /etc/motd?
Message-ID: <678@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM>
Date: 20 Jul 90 05:33:00 GMT
References: <1990Jul18.200754.13129@cs.umn.edu>
Organization: TRW Systems Engineering & Development Division, Redondo Beach, CA
Lines: 41

I have the same problem.

From article <1990Jul18.200754.13129@cs.umn.edu>, by brsmith@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Brian R. Smith):
> But, when one of our novice users logs in through xdm and starts up a
> login xterm, (s)he will never see /etc/motd.

> So, would it be reasonable to augment xterm (yet again) to dump
> /etc/motd (among other things) into its window before starting a login
> shell?

Absolutely not.  There is a perfectly good place to put this, and that is
in the Xsession file run by xdm prior to login.

> I've got a crude hack set up in /etc/.login (sourced before ~/.cshrc
> and ~/.login) right now - if "WINDOWID" is set it cats /etc/motd.

That works only if your users don't use more modern shells :-).

What I'd like to see is a program that can take a text file (determine
a minimum amount of screen space) and just display it with a button
to click on when the user is done reading it.  Xmessage is almost the
program to use.  However, it does not automatically resize above one line
correctly.  Essentially I have to have a program that does just this
(yesterday, sigh).

What I'd like to see is a (possibly scrollable) window come up with the
message of the day.  Unlike Xmessage, I would like the default to show
a number of (reasonable) lines.

Xmessage does that when you know in advance the geometry in pixels and
specify on the command line a -geometry flag.

A temporary solution is to put up the motd in an Xmessage sized for some
fixed number of lines, and then force the user to scroll to see anything
else, but this is a system that will be displaying X windows over
modems running at 19.2kbaud, and scrolling is painful at best.

Is there anything better?

--
steve	baur@venice.SEDD.TRW.COM