Solaris

All,

I'm running Solaris 8 on a Sparcbook. One of my users, when logging in, defaults to Open Windows desktop rather than CDE. All other users get logged into CDE just fine. Is there a file or something that tells the system what default login is? I'm confused as to why it's just for this one user. It has worked in the past for this user...

At log in the user may choose to use the OpenWindows environment instead of CDE.
Source: Solaris 8 CDE and OpenWindows

This should work the other way too (CDE instead of OW).
Hope this helps.

The user almost certainly picked OpenWindows during a login right about when things started going wrong. Been there, done that, though I'd always thought the CDE login was the wrong one. Of course, it's been a LONG time since I've dealt with that, so I have no idea which of the . files in the user's home directory is the important one that you need to change to set things back.

Try creating two new temp users with totally empty home directories. Log in to each one, for the initial login pick CDE for one and OpenWindows for the other. Then log out of both. Do nothing else, and the after you log out you can look for what's different in the temp user's home directories.

Hi leosmith78 I had this same problem in the past, and it can be produced by different problems, it looks like Solaris 8 fallback to OW if the graphical login 'fails'. The bad notice, probably, one of the hidden files is corrupted, but, first of all, you must check the status of the quota (if it is active) and the home folder, it can be full. After that, I'm afraid that the most easy (not best) solution is to move all hidden files and folders to a new folder ( you can consider that the .mozilla/.basrc/.tcsh/.csh/.login/.profile, etc are not implicated, but you must not trust), after this move and a logout, the user will be asked to login in CDE or OW, the user will login in CDE without problem, at this point you can start to restore hidden files/folders and test if the login is correct, first of all you can restore the CDE (.dt) config folder, so you will need to login, see if all is correct, logout, restore a hidden file/folder, login... In my experience the .Xauthority and .Xdefaults files can produce this kind of problems, but every time can be different.

If the graphical CDE login screen appears, first choose Options -> Session and choose Common Desktop Environment.
The session type is saved somewhere in the user's .dt/, I think it is .dt/sessions/lastsession.
Deleting this file will make the CDE login screen automatically go to Options -> Session.