Jaime Herazo B. wrote:
Hi. This is a kinda newbieish question. I'm fond of wmaker, but from time to time i get and try out other windowmanagers, mostly in my questfor The One True Flashy Desktop, something to show-off linux to other people so they all go "wooooow!" :)The problem is that i want to keep starting some stuff on X startup, like a messaging client, some monitoring stuff, and other things. But i wanna do it independently of the windowmanager chosen. Is there a standard debian place for stuff like this? like a $HOME/.startup file or something like that? that isn't dependant on the windowmanager? if not, what would be a good place to start looking for this?
Use .xinitrc or .xsession. I believe using .xsession is supported by the most startup options - i.e. whether you use xinit, startx, xdm, or whatnot (but then why bother with a display manager for a personal system?).
For an example with a very informative (and thorough) explanation, see /usr/share/doc/xfree86-common/examples/xsession.gz (on sid, but should be there in woody too).
I usually start X with startx on this computer, and currently my .xinitrc looks like (a few lines commented out I don't use anymore): #xsetroot -solid black xloadimage -center -onroot -border black img/Fire_eye_1600x1200.jpg xset r rate 250 40 #wmcpu & #wmitime & #wmnd & openboxX will close once the openbox process is terminated. If I wanted to, say, after the xset line launch xclock or maybe xload, I would write it as "xclock &". The '&' (background) is important for anything that does not return immediately (xloadimage and xset return immediately after performing the specified operation). Otherwise execution of the script would stall on xclock and not get to openbox until xclock terminated.
It should be fairly straightforward, but ask if you have any questions, or have in mind any nifty things that you would like to be able to do with it. Debian really supports a very large number of window managers and X utilities apart from standard GNOME and KDE bulk.
And if you want to run openbox3, I will gladly sing its praises! Although for me it is a close call between openbox, window maker, fluxbox, and afterstep.
dircha