Getting Started with CDE (Notes: Doug West, commments etc. : help@math.uiuc.edu)

When selecting CDE as your window manager, a few simple steps will
make your first session less frustrating and allow you to get CDE to behave
mostly as you would like your window manager to behave.

The control panel at the bottom of the screen (which can be moved or removed)
provides several mysterious icons that start up applications when clicked.
To start up netscape, click on the clock (leftmost icon), whose face is a
picture of a globe.

To obtain a terminal window, click on the arrow above the icon that shows
"cpu" (on the right half).  This will pop up a choice that includes a console
window and a terminal window (called "This host").  Either of these will give
you a window into which you can type commands.

If you have a preferred mailer that you want to use and was not taken away
by the upgrade, then don't click on the mail icon (rightmost on the left side),
because that will bring up the default mail-reading program of CDE.  Instead,
start a terminal window and type the desired command (pine/elm/mailx, etc.).

Next, you may be one of those who feel that moving a cursor to a window means
that you want to use it, and therefore it should become active without requiring
you to click on it.  CDE has been set up with a "Click to make active" default.
You can correct this to "Point to make active" as follows:

On the right side of the center of the control bar is a confusing-looking icon
with lots of symbols, including a bunch of "T"s.  This is the style manager,
which our system administration has been calling the "palette".
Clicking on it will bring up another panel with several categories in which
you can modify your configuration.  One of these is "window"; click on it.
Now click on the "Point to make active" button.  If you choose this, you will
probably also want to click on the top checked box below it to disable the
"move to front when active".  These two changes will make the behavior more
like the previous window manager.  After making these changes, click "OK".
CDE will now tell you that the window manager must be restarted to implement
them.  Clicking "OK" will make the screen go blank for a moment and then
return to where you were before but with the new window behavior.

To log out, there is a small square button on the lower right center of
the control panel called "EXIT".  When you click on it, you get a
"logout dialog box".  It informs you that if you logout, then when you
next login the manager will restart in the same setup it had when
you left ("current session").  This means that once you set up windows as
you want them, you can leave them there and they will be there when you log
in again.  To accept this behavior, just click "OK".  If you click "cancel",
then the logout procedure aborts.

You may soon grow tired of always being asked to confirm that you want to
logout and return to the current setup when you next log in.  If so, you
can turn off the logout dialog box from the style manager (palette).
After clicking on the palette, click on "startup" (far right, next to
"Window").  There you can select the absence of the logout dialog.

Other miscellany: If you get tired of being asked whether you really want
to remove the file you just requested to remove, then comment out the line
"alias rm  'rm -i'" that was inserted into your .cshrc file.  This will be
relevant if you have other aliases that use "rm".  It is worth checking out
the new .cshrc that you have been given to select options like printer
destination.  Guidance is available there about what the commands mean.