[3147] in Athena Bugs
standard user tty login
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Krikorian)
Sat Sep 9 01:16:04 1989
Date: Sat, 9 Sep 89 01:15:47 -0400
From: David Krikorian <dkk@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: beth@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, garybean@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, jik@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: dkk@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
A standard user tty login (eg: dialup) will try to start a Zephyr
windowgram client with "zwgc". This will fail, since it assumes an X
display. If the user has "fallback = true" in ~/.zephyr.vars however,
the zwgc will do the right thing (run in tty mode).
Presumably, any user who wants a zwgc running should set fallback to
true, either by adding one line to .zephyr.vars (see above) or
executing "zctl set fallback true". Any user who doesn't want to run
a zwgc must put up with half a screen of errors (from zwgc) or run a
non-standard login. (The invocation of zwgc is in
/usr/athena/lib/init, so it can't be changed.)
Not only did the mention of "fallback" get left out of the release and
dotfile documents, but the explanation of tty logins that is there
(page 21 in "Dotfiles") is wrong, as it was written for an X session.
Consultants should be given a good explanation of what to tell users
about "fallback." (Don't ask me, I've never used it.)
