Re: console-client close to initial check in

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 01:48:25AM -0400, Roland McGrath wrote:
> It doesn't seem especially elegant,
> but it ought to be adequate to ahve a simple feature where the console
> server just runs a specified shell command to do something interesting the
> first time you switch to a virtual console.

Mmmh, yeah, that could work.  Maybe when it also handles the ttys directly.

> > BTW, is there a way to get a getty on it even after boot?  
> 
> What do you mean?  kill -1 1 should make runttys reread ttys.  (Really just
> SIGHUP to runttys, but signals are supposed to propagate from init to
> runsystem to runttys so you can just use PID 1 as is the BSD convention.

I am thinking about running getty on the command line directly, so I can
add one without putting it into ttys and reboot.

> > PS: Running aafire on the client and scrolling up a couple of lines with
> >     LeftAlt + ArrowUp, while the top of aafire's output keeps running in
> >     the bottom half of the screen, is quite a neat effect if you are used to
> >     the jumpy Linux console which doesn't like output while being scrolled
> >     back.
> 
> I prefer the docile behavior too.  But it should be a user option (as it is
> in xterm).  In fact, two options: jump down on new output, and jump down on
> typing.

Ah, yes, put on my to do list.  I would add it right quick, but I would
prefer to have option parsing in drivers implemented before that.  I am
unsure how to do that, though.  Is the following ok?

console --driver vga --many-glyphs \
        --driver pc_kbd --jump-to-bottom-at-keypress \
        /dev/vcs

The devices at the command line are initialized at startup, in argp.  I can
imagine to skip all unknown options up to the next --driver or whatever to
get the options for the device, but this causes a problem with the last
parameter /dev/vcs (which could be an argument to
--jump-to-bottom-at-keypress in the above example), so you would have to 
end option parsing with -- or not use any non options and allows use
--console /dev/vcs or something similar, which is kind of lame.  Any ideas?

Thanks,
Marcus


-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' GNU      http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus Brinkmann              The Hurd http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de/