[533] in Athena User Interface
Documenation/clue dump
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Mon Dec 18 21:19:16 2000
Message-Id: <200012190219.VAA19704@dig-dug.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 21:19:08 -0500
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Random trivia bits useful for a later documentation checklist,
including HOTDs, has been stuck at /mit/aui/notebook/minutae.txt. For
the edification of those who have not had the benefit of stumbling
across all of these bits of triva before, here are the current
contents of the file...
-B.
---
AUI Trivia and Minutae
Note: As of Dec, 2000, you shouldn't be running AUI unless you are in
personal contact with the developers. So be warned.
- HOTDs:
- The Gnome foot is a menu! Click on it!
- When looking to alter or activate items in many place in Gnome,
try right-clicking on the object.
- You can set the startup attributes (including startup location,
and window style and color) for particular applications in
Sawfish / Matched Windows in Control Center (Settings... on the
menu).
- Use the TAB key to avoid typing long filenames or commands at
the prompt!
- Applets are programs that run only on your panel. You can add
them from under the Panel menu.
- To copy text on Athena, highlight it. (Some applications like
Star Office may require you to select Edit / Copy.) Then,
postition the cursor using the left mouse button, and hit the
middle mouse button (or Shift-INSERT at the prompt) to paste.
- To change your background, as well as customize many other
aspects of Gnome, visit the Control Center by choosing
Settings... on the menu system.
- Sawfish, the window manager, refers to the left mouse button as
"Button 1", the center as "Button 2" and the right as "Button 3"
in the default arrangement. By pointing at the titlebar of a
window and hovering there, you can get a popup window that
explains what each button does.
- You can change your default editor to Emacs in the Document
Handlers section of Control Center (Settings... on the menu).
WARNING: Do not run gnome-terminal or click on the default "Prompt"
icon on the panel on SGIs. Your session will crash and leave behind
misbehaving processes. you may need to reboot your machine.
You should remove or comment out any lines in your .environment that
start:
setenv WINDOW_MANAGER
We don't recommend changing your window manager from the new default,
Sawfish; other window managers have not yet been properly integrated
into Athena. We hope you will find Sawfish quite customizable,
however. We especially advise against running twm and panel at the
same time if you log in on SGIs; there is a bug which can crash your
session without much warning. We have a fix for this from SGI which
we are working to deploy.
Turning on Session Management may cause unpredictable results; we
recommend against doing that.
The environment variable $ZEPHYR_CLIENT is no longer honored. Use the
Startup Programs "Non-session-managed" list in Gnome Control Center
instead ("session-properties-capplet &" from the prompt).
Dash has been replaced by the Gnome menus. We hope you can still find
everything. 9)
During debugging, you may want to "add -f aui" in your .environment.
You will also get an extraneous xterm, which you can eliminate with
"set skip_initial_xterm" in the same file.
To capture core file from Gnome, set the following environment
variable:
setenv GNOME_DISABLE_CRASH_DIALOG 1
From /mit/aui/src/third/sawfish/README.olc:
* Sawfish customizations should be made with the GUI, entered by
middle-clicking in the root window and choosing an item under
"Customize". If the user cannot express what they want with the
gui, they can create a ~/.sawfishrc. This file will OVERRIDE all
Athena customizations. If the user wants the Athena customizations
in addition to their own customizations, they should put
"(require 'sawmill-defaults)" as the first line of their .sawfishrc.
* If sawfish fails to load, complaining about its inability to
find a file called "librt.so" or any other file that begins with
"lib" and has ".so" in it somewhere, that probably means that
"aui" is not attached, or they are running on an unsupported
Athena release. In particular, they will get errors like this if
they run Solaris 7 binaries on Solaris 2.6.
* If sawfish fails with "IMLIB ERROR: Cannot find palatte", the user
probably has a bad ~/.imrc.
* If the window borders are colorful line noise on Solaris, then the
user probably turned on MIT-SHM in imlib_config. They should turn
it off.
The reporting address for bugs in AUI is bug-aui@mit.edu. We
recommend reading through the aui and bug-aui discuss meetings on
menelaus if you are going to be testing the system.
Running gnome-termal is preferred to a vanilla xterm because it:
- Does not allow the user to accidentally lock the terminal by
pressing CTRL-s.
- Has nice-looking scrollbars on by default
- Is easily user-configurable using the menu system instead of
X-resources.
Enjoy.
