Re: sessreg in /etc/X11/xdm/Xstartup
On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 21, 2000 at 05:23:19PM +0200, Hervé Eychenne wrote:
> > I'm in touch with Guillaume Morin <gemorin@debian.org> in order to package
> > one of my application for Debian, called ulog. FYI, it intends to be the
> > distributed equivalent of utmp/wtmp for X-window.
> Just FYI, the proper name is the "X Window System". Simply "X" can be used
> for short.
Hey, I could have said X windows... ;-)
Please excuse my poor English.
> > So I'll have to add an entry to /etc/X11/xdm/xdm.options, called "use-ulog".
> > As the xdm package maintainer, I suppose I have to ask you if you would mind
> > adding this entry in you package and what is the exact procedure.
> I'm not sure it is necessary to add options to xdm.options to accomplish
> what you have in mind.
It seems to me the most natural way, as the ulog mecanism is the equivalent
of utmp/wtmp for X, like I said, and the ulog command is the equivalent of
sessreg.
> I need to know nore about ulog first.
In the beginning was the command line, and the console. So, a single screen.
Then appeared who, w, write, talk, last. Well.
Then appeared X, and xterms... And these prior commands suddenly got a
bit old and inadequate.
Several shells on different hosts at a time contained in xterms on different
virtual screens, some iconified, some not...
Talk and write were already dead...
The w command truncates the originating host to 16 poor chars...
Some of the information given by who is often false...
Last relies on a the same files and has the same problems.
The X-related information given by these tools looks to me a bit like
quick tricks in order to take displays into account.
Figure out a university with free access to terminals.
Try to figure out who is currently or who was physically (X session) logged
in on which display or which host, in a whole bunch of rooms full of X
terminals handled by xdm on several hosts in several floors or even
buildings... I wish you good luck, really.
So there had to be a way of logging the adequate information about all these
xdm login/logout events. So I did it. It is called ulog.
The actual code is far from being perfect and ulog is currently under
development, but it seems to work and quite a lot of functionnalities are
already available, so I already consider doing a Debian package in order to
simplify the installation on several hosts. Well, for "real life" tests. ;-)
More information on http://www.ulog.org/
Hervé
--
_
(°= Hervé Eychenne
//) Libre Software Engineer
v_/_
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