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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!swidir.switch.ch!newsfeed.ACO.net!Austria.EU.net!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jkh From: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: "Demo user" - would someone care to do me a favor? :-) Date: 27 Jul 1995 22:14:45 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 56 Message-ID: <3v934l$75v@agate.berkeley.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: violet.berkeley.edu I wanted to do this for the 2.0.5 CD but ran out of time. However, it's still not too late to do this for 2.1! Given that I've still got 1,001 things to do between now and then, I thought I might enlist the aid of some of the folks here in picking up some of the slack and this is also the kind of task that's probably better done by someone with more "user perspective" than I've got anyway.. Here's what I want (and think would be generally cool): A user named "xdemo" who's .login file does the following things in sequence: 1. Checks to see if X is installed and, if not, asks the user nicely to install the X stuff first. 2. Checks to see if there's an XF86Config file and, if not, goes and runs /usr/X11R6/bin/xf86config and generally confirms with the user that the X server is now working by launching it, waiting a few seconds and then killing it again with a final "Did that work?" sort of query (I know, this is kinda crude and I'm open to suggestions for the thorny problem of knowing when/if X is properly set up). 3. Looks for various important things in /usr/local and /usr/X11R6, like fvwm or chimera. If a prerequisite package isn't found, the appropriate pkg_adds should be done after finding (and prompting for, if necessary) the packages directory. 4. Start the whole show up with an .xinitrc file that brings up a full desktop of nifty applications. This would be of great value to users who'd like to see what a "power user's" desktop looks like without having to know each and every bit necessary. After the setup was over with, they could even clone it as appropriate into their own setups (some README file should probably exist in the xdemo user's home directory detailing what dotfiles are important to which applications the user sees). Anyone game to try this? It would hardly be rocket science, but there are a lot of little details to be attended to and some clever shell-scripts to be written in order to make this work. It'd also give FreeBSD something it's long lacked - a nice looking demo screen for computer stores to show off with. I've often wanted to go into such places with the offer of a free CD (or two) if they'd just put it on a machine for display, but have always stopped myself when I realized that there wouldn't be much point! What's the casual passer-by going to find interesting about a '%' prompt sitting on a blank screen? It wouldn't be of much use to either us or the computer store in question to put up such a poor demo, but a full fvwm desktop populated with an xanim in one corner, a nice clock, an xterm or two and perhaps a little slide-show running in another corner (this is all just off the top of my head) would be another thing altogether! Whatcha think? Jordan