fisher@decwin.dec.com (VMS DECwindows Engineering, 381-1466) (03/02/89)
Charmaine (ccl@scampi.sc-scicon.com) asks: Has anybody succeeded in replacing the DECWindows window manager running on VMS? I've been trying to replace the existing window manager by assigning the logical name DECW$WINMGREXE to the new executable. The new window manager was started up at session creation time, but died almost immediately, because it did not know anything about the environment. The logical sys$login, and decw$display are not defined. What do I need to do in order to bring up the new window manager as default? Yes, that is a problem. The problem is that for speed, we start up with window manager as a detached process without running loginout. That means there is no cli, and that means we can't define logical names for the process automagically, except for a few odds and end of things like sys$output. You can find the display by looking at SYS$OUTPUT. This will be defined to be WSAn, a pseudo display device pointing to the display in use. Note that the latter may cause you a different kind of problem. WSAn should act like the null device when you write to it. However, due to a bug, RMS will be unhappy if you try to do that. Thus, if the window manager writes to stdout or some such, it will probably die. Sys$login is a harder problem. We are working on it, but right now, there is no good way for us to define it for you. (You could do a $GETUAI, I suppose). Sorry about the hassle...hope this allows you to get going. We'll try to fix some of these things better in future releases, but no guarantees exactly when. Burns (fisher@decwin.dec.com) VMS DECwindows