SfinxLite

Transition documentation

1. Conceptual changes

The most important part of the changes originates from a change in philosophy: the user (not Sfinx) should own all of his/her startup files and be allowed to make changes.

This expanded freedom has its price: the user has to assume more responsibility when making alterations in the setup. You can't expect the Sfinx Manager to watch and understand all your private modifications.

Also, the names of the setup files will now once again conform to those used in a standard UNIX / X11 environment, making it easier for users already accustomed to such an environment to learn to use Sfinx, and also making it easier for Sfinx users to learn to use other UNIX systems.

However, care has been taken to ensure a certain level of compatibility with the existing Sfinx system (see below, and the full documentation). Only users who already made extensive modifications to the existing system should have to worry, but only a little.

2. Changes in behaviour

Most of the changes are hidden from view, but a few may be noticed:

Fonts: The new system uses the same font for all parts of the window manager interface. This may look a bit sober, but it speeds up loading and it leaves a lot more memory in the oldest X-terminals.
Colors: White is no longer the background color for all applications. Some programs just didn't like such a forced color. Also, less different shades of white and gray are allocated by default, leaving more colormap entries for applications.
New menu entries: Some of the menus now include additional entries. Most of the functionality of the "ABF tools" menu has been transferred to the "packages", "graphics" and "other progs" menus.
Changing colors and settings: Selecting a color for the root window and changing the behaviour of your X session are now accomplished using the programs xbackground and xsetup. Not only do these programs offer a nice interface, allowing more settings to be made, but they also save the changes for later sessions.
Logout procedure: When you exit from the window manager, a logout confirmation window will appear. Click on "OK" to log out, or "Cancel" to restart the window manager (unfortunately, this doesn't work well on "gouwe" and "waal"). The window will also display your quota if these have been exceeded. After all, logging in when no space is available is still difficult, due to the temporary files Sfinx needs to create.

3. Less obvious changes

The changes in the internal workings are more pronounced. Users are referred to the full documentation. There are also many comments inside the files that the Sfinx installation copies to your directory.

4. Optional changes

Users who want to take full advantage of all the new features might want to study the full documentation and comments in the files. Here are a few of the highlights:

Choosing a window manager: Users can now select the window manager to be run by setting the environment variable WINMAN. Choices include: twm, xtwm, ctwm, olwm (Sun and Linux only), fvwm ... When the selected program is not available on a machine, Sfinx will fall back to xtwm, the preprocessor script for twm.
Preprocessed input for ?twm: The standard .twmrc.m4 file is processed by the m4 preprocessor, allowing conditional definitions and included files. You may alter part of the setup, and still include the remainder from the system directory.
Built-in choices for ?twm: A number of overall choices can be made in the .twmrc.m4 file. Default is to make the setup resemble the old Sfinx menus, but a MWM- or OpenWindows-like look is possible with only a little work.

5. Compatibility

The following files which were used by the old system will still be used by the new Sfinx if they are present. However, they are no longer necessary since other methods are available (e.g. the user can modify .xsession directly, in stead of using .Xapplications)

.settings: Preferred: edit .cshrc or .login directly
.Xapplications: Preferred: edit .xsession (don't forget that .Xapplications was a sh script, whereas .xsession used (t)csh.
.packages: Converted to package commands in .cshrc; some of the more exotic uses of .packages are now implemented where needed (e.g. mailhost, twm behaviour, ...).
xtwmrc files: Replaced by .twmrc.m4 (but see below) and .Xresources.

6. Optional enhanced compatibility

Parts of the old Sfinx system will be kept around (although no longer actively maintained). Users who want to delay the change can do so, on some points.

In order to get the old xtwmrc behaviour (the TWM menus created by the special Sfinx xtwmrc preprocessor), a user may change the xtwmrc entry in the .packages file to xtwmrc-oldstyle (Note: the .packages file is renamed to .packages.old during the installation of SfinxLite, but it is safe to create a new .packages file with just this option), or set the environment variable SFINX_XTWMRC to the list of options you want to use (preferred method).

Installing SfinxLite

Now that you are convinced, you will want to know how to install the new version of Sfinx. This is quite simple. Just type $OSdir/Install. This will copy the new files to your directory. The old files will be renamed to e.g. .login.old. In some cases, it will ask for confirmation. This is the case for non-essential files, such as .alias and .emacs.

For more information, see the full SfinxLite documentation at http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~sfinx/sfinxlite/