(!) [Thomas] I am not planning to cover the use of Modules for a while
     yet. However, there are a number of ways you can do what you want. If you
     want all of your pages for all of your desks to have the same colour, then
     you need to do two things:

     1.  In  your  ~/.fvwm/fvwm2rc  file,  you'll  see a function called
     'StartFunction' and it looks like something like this:

AddToFunc StartFunction
+ I Exec exec xsetroot -solid gray66
+ I Test (Init) Module FvwmForm Login
+ I Test (Init) Exec exec unclutter

     When fvwm loads, apart from locating its configuration file, one of the
     first things it does is to look for this function and execute whatever is
     within it. So here, you can see that I have told it to load "xsetroot"
     (which does more or less what FvwmBacker does), and a few other things.
     What you want is to add to this definition and add:

+ I Module FvwmBacker

     for your own StartFunction definition. If you're wondering what the syntax
     means, then:

"+". I think of as meaning "belonging to" a function or definition.
"I". This stands for 'Immediate' and means that it will execute
immediately once the function is invoked. There are other types of
attributes which I won't cover here.
"". Whatever follows after that is a command to be run.

     But this is not enough -- all you have done by adding the above line to
     "StartFunction" is tell Fvwm to load the module. You haven't told it what
     to do with the module. For that, we have to configure the module. The way
     that is done is like this:

DestroyModuleConfig FvwmBacker: *
*FvwmBacker Command (Desk *, Page * *) -solid grey66

     You can add that directly into the file as-is if you like. What it does is
     sets every page on every desk to a solid colour of darkgrey (grey66). You
     can replace 'grey66' with whatever colour you want.

     When you have done all that, restart fvwm, and all (hopefully) should be
     well.

     Hope That Helps,

     [1]  This  is only if new.xinitrc is not a symlink to ~/.xinitrc or
     ~/.xsession, of course.

     [2] The reason why I'm advocating ~/.xsession over ~/.xinitrc is that
     startx will default to ~/.xsession if no ~/.xinitrc file exists. This has
     advantages when using XDM as a display manager, etc.
            ____________________________________________________

(?) Cannot talk using "talk"

                           unless we tell it to?

   From Jaye Inabnit ke6sls 

        Answered By: Thomas Adam, Benjamin Okopnik, Kapil Hari Paranjape 

   Hey guys: 

     I'm just getting 'round to reading this months Gazette. Anyway, about the
     'talk' and 'talkd' issue, make sure you also mention that probably every
     distribution these days disables 'messages', which means that users
     wouldn't even be notified that someone is trying to 'talk' with them.
     Check it with an xterm or in console:

     (!) [Thomas] Actually, it is the default for it to be on, for any Linux
     system that I have come across, but I am not going to argue the point.

   (?) 
jaye@librabogus:~$ mesg
is y
jaye@librabogus:~$

   The  way  I  fixed  this issue was to modify my global preference file
   '/etc/profile' (within [76]Debian systems): 
EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim
PAGER=/usr/bin/less

umask 002

mesg y

     (!) [Thomas] Adding it to /etc/profile is not something I would do - it
     should not be a system-wide policy - making it a local user issue is a
     better idea. Leave your poor users alone.

     (!) [Ben] WHOOPS. As Thomas has already pointed out, this is a very poor
     practice in most cases. There's not much wrong with setting the PAGER to
     "less", but making "vim" the default editor means that new users can get
     horribly confused by an unresponsive beeping application that they don't
     know how to exit. Worse yet, setting the umask to 002 sets up a security
     risk every time a user creates a file - one of which they will usually be
     unaware. These things should not be set by policy (i.e., in /etc/profile)
     but via an informed, per-user decision; that's why individual .profile