Motif 2.2.x on Fedora Core 3

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Motif 2.2.x on Fedora Core 3

Submitted by jkmccarthy on Tue, 09/13/2005 - 02:26. General Questions
I've just installed Fedora Core 3 on an older PC on which I also want to run OpenMotif. I specifically want mwm because I use dual heads (as dual screens, 0.0 and 0.1), and have X Windows configured for True Color on one head (primary) and 256-color (Pseudo Color) on the other head (secondary). [ I have an image display/quicklook tool for Xwindows that manipulates the 256-color LUT, and hence needs to be run on a Pseudo Color screen ... mwm is great because it doesn't gobble up more than a handful of "system" colors itself ... ]. Anyway...

My linux newbie question is whether I need to install OpenMotif (build it) from the source rpm, or whether the "Fedora Core 1" binary rpm will work under FC3 ? Does anyone know ?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

-- Jim

hexcpu

Hi Jim,
I'm not sure about using a FC1 rpm on FC3, I doubt it. Though I,m not sure.
There is a openmotif binary rpm for FC3 at the link below. Hope this helps.

-mike

[/url]http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/2178671/com/openmotif-2.2.3-...

jkmccarthy

Excellent ... thanks Mike !
______

Update when I tried to install the FC3 rpm, it complained that a later version was already on my machine (sure made *me* feel dumb ! - ). This PC has plenty of disk space, so when installing FC3 off the ISO-images, I opted to install "everything". So apparently "openmotif" is bundled with FC3 (and maybe prior versions). Fine.

Now I'd like to know how to add "mwm" to the list of user-selectable display managers the user can choose from at login (KDE, GNOME, and "Failsafe" are the default [only?] options in FC3 now). Under RH7.x, using KDM to manage the login, there was an edit box under System > Login in the KDE preferences GUI where one could enter path name to other display managers like mwm. That edit box no longer seems to exist under FC3. Any suggestions ?

Thanks again,

-- Jim

hexcpu

Heya Jim,
Opps. Sorry 'bout that. I'm not that familiar with FC3 myself. Solaris is my os of choice. Anyhow, does FC distro's still use gdm as the login?(maybe gdm2?). The procedure to
add sessions manually to gdm isn't that involved but its different for gdm and gdm2.If you could post which one you are using I'll post the procedure for ya.

Since you have everything installed, gdm is a GNOME pkg. GNOME desktop might have a sessions editor.

Cheers
-mike

jkmccarthy

Configuring this machine to launch OpenMotif is for me only a [very] part-time activity, so since my last post I've made some headway but not much

Hexcpu was right that GDM was being used as the login manager in FC3 by default. I've now changed that to KDM (via edits to the "preferred" choice in the /etc/X11/prefdm file ... in FC3, the /etc/inittab script invokes this via the line x5once/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon), *but* I still don't see the GUI feature to configure the list of window manager options shown to the user on the login screen. As stated before, under RH7.x there was such a configuration GUI. Any ideas ?

The KDM handbook ( http//docs.kde.org/development/en/kdebase/kdm/ ) says in chapter 7 that any window manager having a ___.desktop entry in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kdm/sessions/ ...should be "automatically" visible on the login screen menu. Indeed there is an "mwm.desktop" file present (and recall my RPM install told me MWM is already installed, *and* the "which mwm" command returns /usr/X11R6/bin/mwm as expected). But again, the only window manager choices I see on the login screen menu are KDE, GNOME, failsafe, previous, and default.

I've looked in kdmrc for the opportunity to make any obvious change that might add mwm to this list, but no luck so far. Anyone able to point in the right direction [again] ?

Thanks much,

-- Jim

jkmccarthy

I finally figured out the problem, so thought I'd document my solution here (in case anyone out there, now or in the future, cares to know -)...

At the very end of chapter 7 of the KDM Handbook (see link in previous message in this thread), it offers this oblique comment "To override a session type, copy the .desktop file from the data dir to the config dir and edit it at will." But I'd not run across definitions of "config dir" nor "data dir", and so up until this point I was looking in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kdm/sessions where indeed there was an mwm.desktop file (but MWM was not showing up as a desktop option on the login screen managed by KDM). Perplexing ... at least to me.

Anyway, the solution was found buried inside /etc/X11/xdm/kdmrc ... there is a line that says

SessionDirs=/usr/share/xsessions

... so this is in fact the "config dir" mentioned above. In this location, I found only gnome.desktop and kde.desktop files (matching the short list present on the FC3 login screen as managed by KDM). So copying mwm.desktop from $KDEDIR/share/apps/kdm/sessions -to- /usr/share/xsession (i.e., from the "data dir" to the "config dir" ??), changing the file permissions to make mwm.desktop executable, and finally editing the mwm.desktop file to add the full path (on my machine, /usr/X11R6/bin/mwm ) to the Exec= and TryExec= lines (which previously said just "mwm" without the path) ... then after logging out, at next login the "MWM" option appears *and* successfully launches OpenMotif.

Whew!

Good luck to all ...

-- Jim