Re: X setup/path advice, please (newbie)

[Cameron Simpson <cs zip com au>]

On 31 Mar 1999, in message <C30AF02039E2D211BF7D0000D11C16EF046DA5 aitexch101u randolph il ameritech com>
  "Barron F. Snyder" <barron f snyder mail ameritech com> wrote:
| One of the great things about Linux is that it is SOOO customizable!

Like most UNIX systems.

| One of the really confusing things to a newbie (this one at least) is that
| Linux is so customizable!

Yep.

| In trying to sort out some path and config issues, I've run into confusion
| and would like some advice from the Linux veterans out there. I seem to have
| duplicate files in various places and want to know the optimal flow for
| starting up X. If this is documented somewhere please let me know (and I'm
| sorry for wasting bandwidth). I've looked and couldn't find it anywhere!
| 
| To start X, I type startx.
| This is a shell script which reads info from xinitrc and xserverrc.
| xintrc refers to some files: xresources and xmodmap.
| 
| What directories should these different files be in? With various copies on
| my machine, I don't know which to modify and which to delete.
| The path to my xinitrc file is currently "/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc".
| The path to my xresources file is currently
| "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/xinitrc".

It depends. (I'll bet you just loved to hear that qualification :-()

To affect things for all users on your system, modify the central files.
This is generally a poor idea. (And just because you're the only user on your
system doesn't mean you show mod the central ones anyway.)

Better to modify the per-user files.

If you read the startx script you'll see that startx (and xinit, its
sibling) only use the central files if the user doesn't have personal
instances, being:
	$HOME/.xinitrc
    and	$HOME/.Xdefaults
respectively.

Just copy the central versions to these and modify the copies.

As an example, one bonus of this approach is that you can take your
home dir to another site, eg work, and it'll "just work". After all,
you won't have sysadmin rights everywhere you go (yea, even folks like
me who are sysadmins by trade don't have this - at my ISP for example).

Cheers,
--
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743        cs zip com au    http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/

in rec.climbing, Pat Nay <patricknay earthlink net> wrote:
> Over the weekend (Sunday) some poor individual took a serious leader fall
> [stuff deleted] ...  Whats up with that?  Is the number of bonehead
> injuries related to the increase in climbers in general or the fact that
> most new climbers are educated in the gym.  Does sport climbing lull new
> climbers into false asumptions of saftey outside or is it that climbing is
> easier for the masses to access?

The Earth increases in mass each day by approximately 10 tons due to 
meteorites and interstellar dust.  Thus over a period of many years, the
gravitational pull on climbers increases.  

Older trad climbers have noticed this increased pull of gravity over the 
years.  However, they have kept this a secret from new climbers.  New
climbers, graduating from the gym to real rock, have not had time to 
adjust to it, thus they take those nasty falls.
	- Lord Slime