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fvwm95-Wharf: xterm comes out black?

From Siddharth Kashyap on Fri, 05 Mar 1999

In fvwm95, I start Wharf. Through I click at xterm icon. This gives me a DARK BLACK xterm window. Please help. This only happens when I enter as a user, not root. I am using Red Hat Linux 5.2

Try renaming your user's ~/.Xdefaults file temporarily. The possibility is that you have some weird settings therein that are starting your xterm with both the foreground (-fg) and the background (-bg) set to black.

I'm not familiar with this "Wharf." I presume it's a fvwm-95 "module" or a small applet which gives you a little "applications dock" --- like AfterStep and the old NeXT desktop, perhaps. If that's the case --- perhaps you have to check some configuration file for Wharf to see if it is starting your xterm with weird command line options.

One trick you can try is to go to a text mode terminal using [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[F2] or such (log in as the same user that is running your X session) and start an xterm from there. You could use the following command:

xterm -display :0 -bg cyan -fg black

... which will start the 'xterm' from outside of that process group. Assuming that this works --- it suggests that your configuration somehow has some weird settings for launching its xterms. We're bypassing those settings and manually starting one.

The the challenge is to track down which part of your system is harboring those settings.

More on fvwm95 Wharf

From Siddharth Kashyap on Fri, 05 Mar 1999

I have Red Hat Linux 5.2 I want to know is this a bug. In the fvwm95 I start something called Wharf. (If you click your mouse on the desktop, you get some options. One of them is Sytem Utilities. In System Utilities, there is Wharf). When you click at Wharf it opens an icon bar. One of the icon is for xterm. When I click at the icon I get a blank xterm window. Please help me.

See my other answer to this question.

Incidentally, it is conventional to keep your .sig (signature) to about 4 lines. Your correspondents probably won't appreciate receiving mail where the "signature" is longer than the message at hand.

Even after all these years, Brendan Kehoe's "Zen and the Art of the Internet" is an excellent guide to the customs and etiquette conventions for many Internet protocols (including e-mail and netnews).

[ Zen and the Art of the Internet can be found online at http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_toc.html. -- Heather ]

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 39 April 1999

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