At 08:27 PM 4/8/2005 -0500, James Miller wrote:
[...]
I picked around a bit further in /etc/X11/xdm and /usr/X11R6 trying to figure out how all this works. It's rather mind-boggling trying to puzzle out how all the relevant files relate to one another, not to mention how each is supposed to work on its own. Your slackwarish suggestion seems worth trying. My problem with it the way it stands, though, is that it invokes xdm, which doesn't give me any sort of menu for chosing between WM's. It's just a bare login window. If I log into it, I'll get another Gnome session (my main WM on this machine) rather than the ion3 session I want. I'll attempt now to puzzle out if there's a way to add other WM's to some sort of menu, starting with the man page.


No menus? This is a Debian system, right? The Debian package manager ... the package installation scripts, to be more exact ... should be adding menu choices to the standard X right-click floating menu without your needing to do anything, working ... as the Marketing Department would say ... just like magic. (Always remembering that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.)

A standard Debian menu of this sort includes a WindowManagers section that lets you select among the available WMs.

All this is done by an app whose mane I'm not sure of (maybe "menu"), from the Debian package "menu". "apt-cache show menu" to see what I'm talking about, and install it if you haven;t already done so ... it will make your use of X much more convenient ... at least after you do the login via xdm.

Or, you might approach this by creating a dedicated userid to run this special WM setup, and use its .xsession file to set things up. Then just log into that userid in the second xdm, and you're set to go.

Avoiding the xdm step may be possible ... an initab line will run any program you like ... but offhand I can't tell you how to start an X session directly. (But try running, say, "top" instead of getty, and you'll see what I mean for simpler apps.) Your main problem will be assigning an effective userid to this session (I'm supposing you don't want it running as root, the way apps started by inittab lines normally run). Becsuewe of the security problems here,people don't seem to write about this option, so it may be tricky in ways that are not obvious at first glance.




- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs

Reply via email to