today's really stupid question

[Myles Green]

You should take a look at Twin, it offers a login and a windowing
environment in text mode as well:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/twin/?topic_id=158

HTH

Myles

On Tue, 2003-04-29 at 19:20, dep wrote:
> 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>
-- 
Myles Green <myles-green at shaw.ca>