Configuring your working environment

The following table shows how the login process works for both workstations and xterminals around the department. The example configuration files assume that you are using tcsh rather than csh.

Workstations (starting an Xserver)
1) .tcshrc	TC-shell configuration file. This file configures your shell environment and should contain configuration information for all shells, such as aliases, prompts, and important environment variables. It is not strictly necessary to put all environment variables here since they will be inherited fromt the login shell, but it is a good idea to put things like your path here so that you know it is always valid when you start a new shell.
2) .login	Login file, but only if the shell is a "login" shell (eg. initial login at console, or when using xterm -ls.) This is where you may want to put special login commands that only execute when you log into a new machine.
3) .setup	Common setup file for both shell and X session logins. I got tired of having my Xterminal and Workstation environments differ simply because I forgot to update one when I made changes so I put common setup commands in this file and reference it from both .login and .xsession.
4) .xinitrc	Startx configuration file (starts the X server.) At this time, all it really does is start the X server, FVWM handles launching various applications at startup.
5) .fvwm2rc95	FVWM Window Manager configuration file. This file does all the configuration of your window manager including: fonts, colors, behavior and additional modules. Click here for more information and other FVWM sites.
6) Applications	(Subshells also reference configuration files)
7) .logout	The logout file works simillarly to .login.

Xterminals (login into previously running Xserver)
1) .xsession	X session startup information. This does much the same thing as .login, but doesn't include the shell configuration commands. This is why you want to have some of these commands in .tcshrc which is always referenced. The file .xsession-errors is an error log file that is very usefull for debugging your configuration files.
2) .setup	Common setup file just like above.
3) .fvwm2rc95	Start the FVWM window manager (same as above.)Click here for more information and other FVWM sites.
4) Applications	(Subshells also reference configuration files)

Other useful tools to make your computing environment more productive:

Color xterm (xterm_color)
This is an xterm with ANSI color extensions compiled in. It doesn't work any differently on black and white displays or with programs that do not take advantage of ANSI escape sequences. However, two programs that do are below.

Special Note! As of May 8, 1996 xterm_color has been installed as the standard xterm on our Solaris machines. This means that "xterm" and "xterm_color" are the same binary file and you can use either one to get the same results described below.

• Gnu ls (gls and dircolors)
  This is the GNU version of ls with color extensions. The easiest way to use it is as follows:
  Make a link for ls to gls somewhere in your private binary directory (I use ~/.bin) and make sure that this is in your path before /usr/bin or /usr/ucb. Note that just making "ls" and alias for "gls" will not work since the dircolors command actually looks for an "ls" binary as part of its setup. For more information take a look at the dircolors man page.

  Then make sure to execute "eval `dircolors -tP`" which will set up the colors based on your .dir_colors file.

  See .tcshrc above for an example.

For more information, see the man pages.
• Midnight Commander (mc) a Norton Commander clone with some very nice features. To use the color features, use "mc -c" in a Color Xterm. Take a look at the man page for more details.