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Re: Security Implications of running startx from command line - was Re: Startx: was Great Debian experience



On Sat 22 Mar 2014 at 21:19:59 +0100, Sven Joachim wrote:

> On 2014-03-22 20:14 +0100, Brian wrote:
> 
> > This is the fourth or fifth time in this thread a recommendation to use
> > ~/.xinitrc has been made. No sensible Debian user would have such a file
> > in his account.
> 
> Care to elaborate why not?  If they use startx, I think they want an
> ~/.xinitrc.

>From /usr/bin/startx:

  # This is just a sample implementation of a slightly less primitive
  # interface than xinit.  It looks for user .xinitrc and .xserverrc
  # files, then system xinitrc and xserverrc files, else lets xinit choose
  # its default.  The system xinitrc should probably do things like check
  # for .Xresources files and merge them in, start up a window manager,
  # and pop a clock and several xterms.

If .xinitrc is found it is used. The system xinitrc in /etc/X11/xinit/
is not consulted. This means that none of Debian's carefully crafted
configuration files in /etc/X11 are sourced.

> > A happy Debian system is one with ~/.xsession.
> 
> I have symlinked ~/.xsession to .xinitrc, but there may be reasons for
> having different content in these files.

The consequence of a symlink is described above. With two separate files
.xsession is not used.


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