Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 75601
.Xdefaults being ignored
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:47:25 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020830 Description of problem: .Xdefaults file is being ignored. Does not matter which session do I start (Failsafe, Gnome, default) the ~/.Xdefaults file is ignored. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.boot into 5th runlevel 2.login using any session 3.launch xterm, or any other program that has settings in .Xdefaults different from program default. In my case -- xterm (Xterm*font: 10x20, etc...), gnuplot (gnuplot*geometry: 1024x768) and other. Actual Results: .Xdefaults is ignored and xterms pops up with wrong fonts, background, etc... Expected Results: .Xdefaults is respected :). xterms starts with 10x20 fonts black background and wheat foreground as specified in .Xdefaults (The .Xdefaults can be verified by typing 'xrdb ~.Xdefaults' in any terminal windows and then starting xterm from this window) Additional info: The bug is reproducible on multiple systems, different configs etc...
Use .Xresources instead of .Xdefaults. This is documented in the XFree86 manpages. .Xdefaults died a long time ago...
And which man page would it be? 'man XFree86' has nothing about it. Neither have RH8.0 release notes. BTW, this .Xdefaults file used to work for me for almost 10 years from Tamu till RedHat7.3 So may be I am just way over the hill and 7 month (since rh7.3 release) is indeed a long time ago... Sincerely, Dmitri.
grep the manpages if you wish. My point is that this is an XFree86.org change, and NOT a Red Hat change. Contact them directly if you disapprove.
This point must have been very subtle. My points are: You said: "This is documented in XFree86 manpages" and this is not true (I did grep manpages). You said: ".Xdefaults died long time ago" and this is not quite true either -- XFree86 4.1.x still supported it. Sorry, I also did not know that bugzilla is for bugs introduced by Red Hat only...
My point is that you wont find .Xdefaults documented on the manpages since it isn't supported. Red Hat kept the files for a while after XFree86.org obsoleted them. Now Red Hat has followed suit also and gotten rid of them. There is no need for them, just use Xresources. This is not a bug introduced by Red Hat, it is an ancient piece of X legacy from ages ago which was dropped by XFree86 in version 4.0 or thereabouts, and hasn't been supported by XFree86 since then. Red Hat Linux has added it in as a legacy backwards compat feature for a while, and it is removed now too. You can complain all you like, but the Xdefaults is not coming back period. End of story. Now go get a life.