What is "Start dummy" option in Fvwm?

[wheelnut]

Exploring OpenBSD and Fvwm, I selected pretty-much all the options under (Re)Start. They did various things. Then I selected "Start dummy". Out of curiosity. Now I feel like it's only there to test how dumb users are. (..eye-roll..) ;-) With it selected, the mouse stopped working. Thankfully, the xterm was still active, so I could drop to root and restart. or reboot. I'm new enough to the whole thing that I don't know yet how to restart fvwm without switching to cwm and hitting ctr-alt-shift-Q. whatever.

anyway.. on reboot.. I can't get back in. the hard-drive is encrypted, or it requires a passphrase.. and my passphrase doesn't work. I tried plenty of times, I feel pretty sure that it should have worked. I even tried going into the "bios", whatever it's called on the t430, and changing this root password. on my dell's, you can do that. I couldn't get in. It required yet another password, I assumed the same one, but it didn't work.

ultimately.. I re-installed. what else could I do? [not so difficult or scary since I'm still so new to the system that I haven't had time to do anything with it yet. I've connected wifi and set the wallpaper in increasingly fancy ways, found out I "strongly dislike" using gnome on it, and that crystal.. might work great, might not be so hard to install.. but that I'm actually more curious now about cwm. ..that is my current project, interrupted briefly by this trip-wire..] I've google'd ..erm.. duckduckgo'd "start dummy fvwm", and found nothing.. didn't look -that- hard..

I have found this:

> > + "Start dummy" Restart xterm -sb

https://www.fvwm.org/fvwm-ml/0017.html

..and I'm exhausted.. I hope people find this question entertaining and useful. I'm mainly just curious.

[Onauk]

From what I can tell, the "Start dummy" option is there to launch X11 and just xterm but no window manager. So you would get only a graphical interface with xterm but absolutely nothing else. So no fvwm, no window decoration, no title bar, no menu bar, nothing.

You can see the difference with other (Re)Start options like "Restart Fvwm" which launches "Restart /usr/local/bin/fvwm2". In that case you would get fvwm of course.

As for `"Start twm" Restart twm`, this option quits fvwm and launches twm, another different window manager.

[jggimi]

OpenBSD's full disk encryption ("FDE") services at boot are provided through a collection of services on the amd64, arm64, i386, riscv64, and sparc64 architectures:

• The softraid(4) driver
• The bioctl(8) utility
• The installboot(8) utility
• The architecture-specific boot loader

I believe your FDE passphrase problem was unrelated to your X Windows provisioning change.


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On the amd64 architecture, you can switch your display and keyboard out of the running X system, over to the OpenBSD console, using the Ctrl key, Alt key, and Function Key F1 on your keyboard. You can return to the X Window system with Ctrl-Alt-F5 keys, and there are alternate tty(4) devices you can switch to with Ctrl-Alt and keys F2, F3, F4, and F6.

[wheelnut]

Originally Posted by jggimi

I believe your FDE passphrase problem was unrelated to your X Windows provisioning change.

Well, so much for that. I tried to test this suggestion, but I'm unable to reproduce the problem. ..I guess that's a good thing.. ;-)

..I'll look into your other suggestions in more detail soon :-)

[wheelnut]

Thanks to all!