Re: Help with login/environment: bash_profile, bashrc, xdm

[Paul Mackinney <paul@mackinney.net>]

Matthew Weier O'Phinney declaimed:
> > I was using gdm and all was fine, except that
> > So I switched to xdm
> Just a question... do you really need to use a session manager? 
> 
> I've been using blackbox for a year now, and I do fine without a session
> manager (I did fine without one before, too). The 'startx' command gets
> you into X when you need it (which, granted is most of the time for me),
> and also means that your environment is preserved when you enter X. Any
> items I specifically want in all term environments I throw into my
> .bashrc (aliases, some environmental variables, etc). Any programs I
> want to run on initialization of X I throw into .xinitrc. 
> 
> -- 
> Matthew Weier O'Phinney
> matthew@weierophinney.net
A very good point, I've also mostly used startx but with .xsession
instead of .xinitrc--my understanding is that startx will use whichever
one it finds. Is there any difference that you know of?

Regarding 'why?', I can only say that I was seduced by the dark side of
GUI--for about two weeks gdm showed a picture of my daughter on the
background, and my cute 'Rat Hed Linux' logo in the login window. Then
it ceased to display the PNG's without reporting any errors, even after 
being reconfigured. Since xdm was installed, I thought I could just
switch to it but then I found that it wasn't processing .bash_profile.

I'll check out the website referenced in the previous reply and see what
I can figure out.

Thanks, Paul
-- 
Paul Mackinney
paul@mackinney.net