From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0rc1) Gecko/20020417 Description of problem: rxvt-2.7.8-3 shipped with RHL 7.3 ignores X resources specified in .Xdefaults Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Add or change an XTerm or Rxvt resource in .Xdefaults 2.xrdb -merge to pull in the change, or restart X (just in case) 3.start rxvt Actual Results: rxvt stays with default colors, fonts, etc. Specifying them on the command line works fine. Expected Results: one should be able to customize the terminal's appearance. Using rxvt-2.7.6-4 from RHL 7.2 works fine in this respect. Additional info: At one point, someone disabled rxvt's getting of .Xdefaults in the spec file. However, that is not the case this time: --enable-xgetdefault is right in there. Recompiling shows that the proper #ifdef is being set in the code, but for whatever reason the resource grabbing is just broken. Haven't run the code under a debugger yet to follow what might be going wrong.
Works for me with rxvt. [But it's something else with xterm. Since xrdb -merge doesn't overwrite existing resource properties, it is not possible with -merge to overwrite defaults.]
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 61597 ***
Added to .Xresources: Rxvt*background: black Rxvt*foreground: white $ xrdb -merge .Xresources WORKSFORME
Hmm. Doesn't work for me on two seperate machines. Both machines upgraded from 7.2 rather than a fresh install and using Windowmaker for a desktop, though. Tried .Xresources rather than .Xdefaults, emptied the files, put in just your two lines, tried xrdb, xrdb -merge, and restarting X. No go. rxvt-2.7.6-4.i386 works perfectly. Go figure. Bigger version numbers aren't always better I guess. Furthermore, all other X resources I set for other programs are honored. (sorry I missed the duplicate bug - my guess is a search on bugs in the Red Hat Linux product might not catch ones in the beta product?)
I don't see why this is a duplicate of bug #61597. This one is about "xrdb -merge .Xdefaults" failing (which I cannot reproduce). The other report is about rxvt not reading .Xdefaults itself. @reporter What do you get when you ran "xrdb -query | grep -i rxvt" before and after you merge in your properties?