Re: FVWM: how to start up xterms and applications with a session manager

[Adrian Mariano]

Lars Segerlund wrote:
I think you're looking for .xsession ( check it up ).
I tried .xsession before mailing the list.  As noted below, all the evidence 
suggests that .xsession will not be executed if the display manager finds a 
window manager to start up.

A better way with a modern fvwm would be to have fvwm start it from it's 
init.hook ( in the configuration files for fvwm ).
The file init.hook does not appear to be mentioned in the fvwm documentation.  I searched
for on with google and did find a reference wherein somebody reads this file with 
InitFunction in the .fvwm2rc file.  


You might also find [1] of interest.
-- Thomas Adam
[1] http://linuxgazette.net/100/adam.html
 

Reading [1] was actually very enlightening as it cleared up a 
fundamental confusion I
suffered from.  I don't want a session manager!  (My desktop gets more 
and more
cluttered until I finally log out and start fresh.  A session manager to 
preserve the clutter
is not what I need.)  I was thinking that the display manager was the 
session manager. 
Of course it makes sense that you wouldn't want to start up a bunch of 
apps if you were
using a session manager since presumably the session management is going 
to be starting
up the saved session.

Thomas Adam wrote:
To answer the querent directly, what you probably want to do, is:
update-alternatives --config x-session-manager
update-alternatives --config x-window-manager
This will change it globally, and x-session-manager takes precedence
over x-window-manager unless it is configured by the user. This depends,
of course, as to which display manager you use. KDM and GDM AFAIK have
to be coerced into using ~/.xsession (which is where you place all of
your commands to start up, including the session manager). XDM and
startx use ~/.xsession by default.
 

Right now KDM is installed.  There is an elaborate script system with 
scripts in /etc/X11/Xsession.d
(I think) which resembles the rc.d startup scripts.  The scripts are 
numbered and run in order, and one
of these scripts will run the user .xsession file but only if a window 
manager wasn't already started by
a previous script.  I could insert a script in this sequence to force 
the system to run a user .xsession
file (or modify the existing script to always run that file).  But I 
guess I presumed there was a more
natural way to do it.  I don't know what program is responsible for 
running all of these xsession scripts.
The current setup where the display manager gives a menu of window 
managers and it is possible to
select Gnome or KDE may be useful to me for some other occasional users 
of the system. 
I'll look into update-alternatives.  It's not obvious what the effect of 
designating a window manager
would be for the current setup where there is a menu of several.  

I don't have access right now to the system in question, so I can't test 
anything out, but it appears
that I should be able to avoid using a session manager and to use the 
InitFunction command in the
.fvwm2rc file to start whatever stuff I want, either directly or through 
loading a file such as the
init.hook file mentioned above.  Is this the right approach?   Or is it 
preferable to arrange somehow
that the user .xsession file gets executed (before?) the window manager 
is started. 


--
Visit the official FVWM web page at <URL: http://www.fvwm.org/>.
To unsubscribe from the list, send "unsubscribe fvwm" in the body of a
message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To report problems, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]