today's really stupid question

[Kurt Wall]

An unnamed Administration source, dep, wrote:
% okay.
% 
% as part of my renewed campaign to revive the console as a place where 
% even newbies can do useful business -- and as a place with which 

Now there's a quixotic undertaking. Me, I'm still tilting at 
windmills...

% *everyone* ought to be able to do useful business, in that xfree is 
% just to fragile, especially with distributors dicking around with it 
% -- my attention had been drawn to a nifty little app called pdmenu. 
% (http://www.kitenet.net/programs/pdmenu/)
% 
% it's wonderfully dos-looking<g>. editing the menus is a little 
% obscure, but no worse, say, than adding applications in gnustep used 
% to be.

How quaint. <sarcasm>Look, Doris, the kids have a menu on their screen!
Ain't that cute.</sarcasm>
 
% anyway, supposedly there's a way to configure it to act as a nice, 
% console-based login manager, ala xdm/kdm/gdm without x. the 
% documentation in this regard is limited to: "As a login shell. (Just 
% change their shell, it works fine.)" which is dandy, except a.) i 

Okay. "Just change their shell" I take to mean replacing /bin/bash
in /etc/passwd with /usr/bin/pdmenu. Thus,

bubba:x:1000:100:Bubba Lunchbucket:/home/bubba:/bin/bash

becomes

bubba:x:1000:100:Bubba Lunchbucket:/home/bubba:/usr/bin/pdmenu

(or where pdmenu gets installed).

Until you are satisfied it works, don't make this change to a real
user. Create a dummy account you can throw away and try it with that
one.

Another alternative is to call /usr/bin/pdmenu as the first line
in users' $HOME/.bash_login, $HOME/.login. The problem I see with
this is that there's nothing to keep bubba from using shell sessions
in apps to get a console session.

% have no idea where their shell is called and b.) in that i'm already 
% booting to a console login prompt, i have no reason to think that 
% this would be called from there anyway. my *guess* is that calling it 
% from rc.local would do the trick, but kurt remembers (or should) the 
% *last* time i threw something into rc.local without *knowing* what i 
% was doing.

I remember that day. Obviously, dep does, too. ;-)

% consider all of the above to be a question.<g>
 
% also, while i'm here -- does anyone know of anyone who still sells (it 
% would have to be old stock) the corel suite, and if so, whether it 
% includes sufficient wrappers to allow it to run on a modern linux?
% -- 
% dep
% 
% http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within
% the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.
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-- 
All Finagle Laws may be bypassed by learning the simple art of doing
without thinking.