SYNOPSIS
gpm-root [ options ]
DESCRIPTION
The program gpm-root is designed to handle Control-Mouse
events to draw menus on the background of the current tty.
The actual menus are described by a configuration file in
the user's home directory.
Please note that gpm-root needs to run with Linux 1.1.73
or newer, because previous kernels lack some screen han
dling capabilities required by the program.
The program uses the files /dev/vcs* to draw to the con
sole screen. These are available only from kernel 1.1.81
onward. If you miss those device nodes, you should create
them using create_vcs in the distribution directory. The
tool won't run with kernels older than 1.1.81, because
they lacked a full screen dump/restore capability.
Available command line options are the following:
-m number
Choose the modifier to use (by default: control).
The modifier can be provided either as a number or
as a symbolic string. Allowed strings are shift,
anyAlt, leftAlt, rightAlt, control.
-u Deny using user-specific configuration files. With
this option on, only /etc/gpm/root.conf will be
used as a source of configuration information. This
option is intended for those system administrators
who fear security could be broken by this daemon.
Things should be sufficiently secure, but if you
find a hole please tell me about it.
-D Do not automatically enter background operation
when started, and log messages to the standard
error stream, not the syslog mechanism. This is
useful for debugging; in previous releases it was
done with a compile-time option.
-V verbosity increment
Raise the maximum level of messages that will be
logged. Thus a positive argument has the effect of
making the program more verbose. One can also give
a negative argument to hush the program; however,
note that due to getopt(3) rules a negative argu
The syntax for the file won't be described here, being it
quite apparent from the example above. Blanks and newlines
are unused in parsing the file, and the layout of the file
is free. Comments are allowed in the file: any hash mark
(#) found at the beginning of the line or after white
space makes the parser discard anything up to the next
line. To insert quotes (") in strings precede them with a
backslash.
Note that recursive menus are allowed, to any level of
recursion.
Keywords belong to three groups: the button keyword, the
cfg keywords and the action keywords. They are all
described in the table below:
button number menu
The button keyword is used to introduce a menu. It
is followed by the number of the relevant button
(1=left, 2=middle, 3=right), an open brace, a menu
and a closed brace. A menu is made up of cfg
statements, followed by action statements. Cfg
statements can come in any order, while the order
of action statements tells the actual order in
which actions will appear on the screen, top to
bottom.
The following statements belong to the cfg set.
name string
If the name keyword is present, the specified
string will be used as the name for the current
menu.
background color
This statements is used to specify the background
color to be used in the current menu. The color can
be specified with one of the eight canonical
strings black, red, cyan etc. The background
defaults to black.
foreground color
This statements is used to specify the foreground
color for menu items. Its value defaults to white.
An optional bright keyword can appear before the
actual color.
border color
When the mouse button is released above the corre
sponding menu item, the cmdstring is pasted in the
keyboard queue of the current console. This is not
yet implemented.
string f.bgcmd cmdstring
When the mouse button is released above the corre
sponding menu item, a shell (/bin/sh) is forked to
execute the specified command, with stdin connected
to /dev/null, and stdout, stderr connected to the
active console.
string f.jptty ttynumber
When the mouse button is released above the corre
sponding menu item, the console is switched to the
one specified. The ttynumber must be specified as a
string. Any tty can be reached this way, even those
which are not accessible via the keyboard.
string f.mktty ttynumber
When the mouse button is released above the corre
sponding menu item, an unused console is selected,
and /sbin/mingetty is executed in it. The current
console is switched to the newly opened console. I
use this command to save kernel memory by opening a
single console through /etc/inittab and requesting
the others only when i need to login.
string Whole-menu
A menu can directly follow the label string. When
the mouse pointer leaves the menu frame at the
level of string, a second menu is posted on screen.
string f.lock
When the mouse button is released above the corre
sponding menu item, the keyboard and the screen are
locked, and only the locking user or the superuser
can unlock them. This is not yet implemented.
string f.load
The current loadavg when the menu is posted is con
catenated to string to build the actual message
displayed on screen. Nothing happens at button
release.
string f.free
The free memory and swap when the menu is posted is
concatenated to string to build the actual message
displayed on screen. Nothing happens at button
release.
string f.time
string f.nop
This does nothing, it only displays string on the
menu.
The HOME, LOGNAME and USER environment variables are setup
to the values for the invoking user before spawning an
external process (f.bgcmd, f.pipe). The current directory
is always /.
BUGS
Known bugs have been fixed. In particular, if you invoke
gpm-root right after gpm, it will delay a few seconds
before trying to connect to the daemon.
AUTHOR
Alessandro Rubini <rubini@linux.it>
FILES
/dev/gpmctl The socket used to connect to gpm.
/etc/gpm/root.conf The default configuration file.
$(HOME)/.gpm-root The user configuration file.
/dev/vcs* Virtual Console Screens
SEE ALSO
gpm(8)
The info file about `gpm', which gives more complete
information and explains how to write a gpm client.
February 1995 GPM-ROOT(1)
Man(1) output converted with
man2html