earle@POSEUR.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle - Sun JPL on-site Software Support) (10/17/89)
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!