Mumia, Clive, Nyizsnyik and others,
Incidentally, I've not monkeyed with any of the
scripts. They are just as installed.
At Mon, 25 Sep 2006 09:56:38 -0500 Mumia W. Paduille said,
Debian uses its "alternatives" system. Startx (probably) invokes
/usr/X11/.../xinitrc which (probably) invokes /usr/bin/x-session-manager
which links to /etc/alternatives/x-session-manger which links to
xfce4-session.
There is no /usr/X11/ here. /usr/X11R6 exists. Perhaps
your system was built a few months earlier than mine.
"which startx" reports /usr/bin/startx which
defines
sysclientrc = /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
which invokes /etc/X11/Xsession
which defines a bunch of X related variables such as
OPTIONFILE=/etc/X11/Xsession.options
At which point there are so many possibilities that
I lose track. Seems that the only practical way to
understand, is to make each suspect script report it's
own invocation to a console or log. By adding a line
such as this for example.
echo "/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc invoked" >> ?.log
**** Someone please tell me how to do this properly. ****
At Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:40:06 +0100 Clive Menzies said,
> I think you'll find it in your home directory: .Xsession
There is a .Xauthority and a .xsession-errors.
/home/peter/.Xsession does not exist here.
At Fri, 29 Sep 2006 08:39:46 +0200 Nyizsnyik Ferenc said,
> Debian uses .xsession. For example, my .xsession file contains:
> /usr/bin/startxfce4
nf> So my default desktop environment is Xfce. My wife doesn't have
nf> an .xsession file in her home directory, so her default is Gnome.
There is no /home/peter/.xsession here and the default
GUI remains Xfce.
Any slightly perceptive observer will inevitably wonder
whether all the indirection and other complexity is
necessary or even beneficial. Does anyone ever think
of building an efficient GUI for Linux?
Thanks to everyone, Peter E.