today's really stupid question

[dep]

begin  Kurt Wall's  quote:

| % 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.

okay. first, my goal is not to make a console session impossible to 
schieve. instead, my goal is to replace all the gui 
login/desktop-selection stuff (xdm, kdm, gdm) with something that 
does pretty much the same thing, only in a non-x, non-framebuffer, 
plain old text-based screen. second, my goal is to provide a menu (as 
in xdm, kdm, and gdm's drop box) so that the user, after having used 
this nice application to log in, can choose kde, or gnome, or xfce, 
or enlightenment and its desktopish accessories, or midnight 
commander, or emacs (think of it: a text menu with emacs on it! it 
would drive emacs hackers to jump off the roof!), or mutt, or a 
console session, whatever. the idea is to replace the login and 
password prompts as well as the initial shell prompt. which i'm 
beginning to think requires, probably, a script in rc.d for the 
appropriate runlevel, as, say, xdm does in a cartoons-only login.

| % 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. ;-)

good. do you remember how i got out of it? i may need that information 
soon.<g>
-- 
dep

http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within
the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.