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Conference turris::digital_unix

Title:	DIGITAL UNIX(FORMERLY KNOWN AS DEC OSF/1)
Notice:	Welcome to the Digital UNIX Conference
Moderator:	SMURF::DENHAM

Created:	Thu Mar 16 1995
Last Modified:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Last Successful Update:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:	10068
Total number of notes:	35879

9662.0. "/etc/issue has problems with CDE!!!" by sloppp1port2.slo.dec.com::Mitchell Brown ([email protected]) Tue Apr 29 1997 19:08

I have a customer (the US Defence Information Systems Agency) that has a small 
problem.  We just managed to sell them a TurboLaser, with Digital Unix.  This 
is going to be a showcase machine.  We sold it at a pretty hefty discount to 
try and encourage them to buy more later...

Anyway, in order for them to legally put this system into production, they 
have a large batch of text information that must be displayed before the login 
prompt.  We used to handle this with gettydefs, but that is too short.  

I found the notes that indicated that we can now use /etc/issue to perform 
this.  It works fine for tty terminals and telnet sessions, but with X 
sessions, the window that pops up is too small, and doesn't display all the 
information.

Where is the /etc/issue documented?  Can someone get me information on the X 
resources used to control the dialog box size & shape?  This is VERY urgent.  

Thanks in advance!

T.R	Title	User	Personal Name	Date	Lines
9662.1	Oops - forgot to sign it...	sloppp1port2.slo.dec.com::Mitchell Brown	[email protected]	`Tue Apr 29 1997 19:26`	5
	Ooops - forgot to sign that one. Mitch Brown [email protected]
9662.2		UNXA::BEUTE	No good deed ever goes unpunished...	`Wed Apr 30 1997 11:05`	13
	>>Where is the /etc/issue documented? Can someone get me information on the X >>resources used to control the dialog box size & shape? This is VERY urgent. There was supposed to be a manual page on /etc/issue for Platinum, but it was overlooked. This was QAR'd and will be fixed in a future release. Both xdm and dtlogin use the same code to display an /etc/issue message. It uses a standard XmCreateInformationDialog call to create the box. The limitation you are probably running into is that both dtlogin and xdm have a 255 character limit on message size in /etc/issue. If that's not enough, your best recourse is to file an IPMT case to raise it.
9662.3	Amazing - Fix a problem to not fix it at all.	sloppp1port2.slo.dec.com::Mitchell Brown	[email protected]	`Wed Apr 30 1997 19:16`	9
	That is amazing. When I search through stars looking for the "/etc/issue" issue, I find that it was added to V4.0 as a fix to the problem that gettydefs only supports 255 character messages. Evidently lots of customers, primarily military ones, required longer messages. So, when introducing the fix for character terminals, we introduce the old, problematic limitation for X displays???????
9662.4	Workaround?	IOSG::MARSHALL		`Fri May 02 1997 08:17`	10
	As a simple workaround, why not write a (trivial) program that pops up a window containing the contents of /etc/issue, with an OK button. When the OK button is hit, your program 'exec's dtlogin. You might also want to do initialisation things such as resetting the X server, etc. You could either modify /sbin/rc3.d/S??xlogin to call your program instead of dtlogin, or you could name your program dtlogin, and move the real dtlogin somewhere else. Scott