Panther and X11 issues

[homeshire]

I seem to have some issues with X11, which are almost certainly the result of my own ignorance, but I'm trying to learn.
As I recall, the Panther terminal was now supposed to ship with a default shell bash. My terminal still defaults to tcsh. That's not a complaint, just an observation for others to be aware of. I don't know enough about it to know if this is good, bad or otherwise.
I have noticed that my ability to customize X11s application menu is iffy at best. Some paths work, others seem to go nowhere. I check the path, and sure enough things are there as they're supposed to be, but the application menu just seems not to care. But what gets me is that when I enter a command which I know is good, i.e. montage (from ImageMagick), I get the response unmatched: tcsh'
I am fairly certain that my path(s) are a bit goofy, and things don't lead where they always should. My question is, how do I straighten it all out?
for information purposes, when I printenv PATH, my response is as follows:
/sw/bin:/sw/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin

Another question I have is, I thought we had the ability to switch between shells in terminal. Default to tcsh, but open a bash if you wish. If so, how does one do that, or is my assumption incorrect?
thanks for any help.

I've just discovered that while printenv DISPLAY yields nothing in Terminal, it does indeed yield :0.0 in xterm. I wonder why?

 

[daveL]

I'm just taking a stab here, but it sure sounds to me as though you have hosed your shell environment when you went to Panther. Were you running Jag before and upgraded? The fact that DISPLAY is unset in TERMINAL, but yields :0.0 in xterm is a clear indication that your environment is screwed up. However, having said that, it's difficult, from afar, to diagnose where the problem might be. You need to get your shell initialization files fixed, I expect (i.e., .cshrc, .profile, .bash_profile, .bashrc, etc). These would be under your home directory and can be seen with "ls -al" in the Terminal.

To start a bash shell, simply type bash<cr>. It can get a bit confusing, because the bash shell will be a sub-shell to the one you started with, so when you exit bash, you'll be back in the shell you started with.

HTH

 

[homeshire]

daveL --

yes, I upgraded from jaguar to panther. I ran your suggested command, ls -al, and it spit back a whole lot more than I'm sure you'd want to look at -- an entire listing of permissions in my home directory. wouldn't know what to do about them.

I don't necessarily want to switch to bash. I was just asking if I was correct in remembering that that should now be the default shell. I wouldn't know if bash is better than tcsh or not.

If my paths and environments are screwed up, how do I go about finding out and fixing them? I know that about a year ago I had the same kind of issue after installing a cm latin dictionary which was not configured to install itself in the proper path, but was rather a bit of a hack job, and then subsequently installing ImageMagick , which did not play nice with the dictionary that had screwed up paths. It took me about 40 exchanges with someone at apple support discussions to get it straighened out and both working. Then I later screwed it all up with a separate hard drive issue and was at square 1 again. But by that time I didn't care because the dictionary had come out with an update including a gui for OSX.

so I know my paths are screwed up, and that I can fix them through pico. I just don't know the dirty details that are the difference between doing it right, and hosing the hole damn shebang.

edit: I was just poking around fink commander, and I noticed that it claims I do not even have bash installed. Most everything else that I do myself, or has been done by some other function is there recorded in fink commander as current. So am I correct in thinking that I don't even have bash?

 

[daveL]

bash comes with OS X, as well as most other standard Unix/Linux commands. Fink is just saying you don't have Fink's distribution of bash. All the Fink stuff is installed under /sw, which you have first in your PATH, so you will always run the Fink version of a comand, even if it also exists in OS X. That may not be a good thing. If I were you, I'd put /sw/bin as the last element in your PATH, not the first; you definitely don't need /sw/bin in there (PATH) twice, as you do, although this won't actually do any harm.

Bash is the default shell in Panther, but if you kept your Jag user account, it shouldn't change. If you were to create a new user account, the shell would be bash.

You can always do a 'man tcsh' and 'man bash' for info on the startup files (.cshrc, .bash_profile, etc.)

 

[homeshire]

yup, i just looked in another (new to panther) acct. and sure enough their default shell is bash. however, i still couldn't get a response there to printenv DISPLAY. as for changing the path in my acct., i guess i should, and i'd love to, i'm just not clever enough to figure out how. is it done through pico? setenv?

i'm just not enough the geek, and i'm not sure if i should even pursue it because nothing important to me is broken. i just hate when i'm made aware that something isn't right according to specifications.

thanks