Re: Helix Desktop first release and default "open in terminal"terminal

["Kevin D. Knerr, Sr." <kknerrsr ptdprolog net>]

On 19 Mar, Warren Young wrote:
> Evan Read wrote:
>> 
>> Right, and my second question.  I am quite a fan of Gnome-Terminal.  FOr
>> some reason though, whenever I set anything to launch "In a Terminal", it
>> bring up this acient looking terminal with a wierd scroll bar on the left
>> hand side and seemingly no customisation options.  I want to use the one
>> that is accessable from the bar accross the bottom on a default install
>> (which I believe is Gnome-Terminal).  How do I change this system variable
>> (I hope it is a variable ;).
> 
> What program is it that's offering this "launch in a terminal" option? 
> Any Gnome program should launch gnome-terminal for you.  Sounds like
> you're using some non-Gnome thing like IceWM's launcher, or XFM, or
> something odd like that.

If you use the GNOME menu editor, there is a checkbox option for "launch
in a terminal".

GNOME does not necessarily launch a GNOME-terminal. The following was
posted to the sawmill list by Benjamin Kahn <xkahn@cybersites.com> on
05-Jan-00:

| How does gnome choose which terminal program to use?  It's
| undocumented in Gnome 1.0 - 1.54, but I've seen screenshots of Gnome
| 1.1 which allows changing this setting.  In 
|
|        ${HOME}/.gnome/Gnome
|
|        add this:
|
| [Applications]
| Terminal=gnome-terminal -x
|
| to use the gnome-terminal.  (Or change it to anything you want.)  Many
| people do not have that file already.  Any time a terminal is started,
| this value should be checked.  (If this value does not exist, just use
| xterm -e)  

BTW, this *does* work. I added a line to use "rxvt -e" as my default
term, while my shells menu gives me a complete selection of terms,
including eterm & gnome-terminal.

> In any case, the weak terminal program you're seeing is either xterm or
> (less likely) rxvt.  The quick and sleazy way to fix this is to find
> your xterm binary, rename it, and then create a symlink to
> gnome-terminal called xterm.  
> 
> In Red Hat Linux, you'd do it like this (notice the root prompt!):
> 
> 	# which xterm
> 	/usr/bin/X11/xterm
> 	# cd /usr/bin/X11
> 	# mv xterm nasty-old-xterm--barf-barf-barf
> 	# ln -s `which gnome-terminal` xterm
> 
> Other Linuxes and Unixes may well behave differently, but you should see
> the overall idea behind what I've done above.

Rather than renaming the xterm binary, if you really want to go this
route, you'd be better off making an alias for several reasons: the
change is local to a given user (not as important on single user
systems, but I believe in developing good habits early), you don't risk
problems down the road when some other program expects xterm to be a
true xterm, you minimize user confusion when the xterm man page does not
describe the xterm behavior they're getting, and it's *very* easy to go
back to a true xterm (for whatever reason) by simply specifying the full
path to the xterm binary without having to remember what you renamed it
to.

FWIW, the ancient XTerm is quite customizable--it just relies on the old
hand-edited resource file method. But no, it won't support all of the
gee whiz features of its descendants, like rxvt, eterm, &
gnome-terminal.

Regards,

Barthel
-- 
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Resistance (< 1 ohm) is futile.