Re: customize Debian 11 evironment in lightdm (and in general?)
On Fri, 6 May 2022 at 02:55, Giovanni Biscuolo <g@xelera.eu> wrote:
> I'm trying to customize my user environment when using the lightdm
> display manager (then the LXDE desktop environment)
>
> I need to customize some variables so I can see Guix installed
> applications in my desktop menu, in particular I need to customize
> XDG_DATA_DIRS and XDG_CONFIG_DIRS
[...]
> When I log in via lightdm to an LXDE session, I open LXterminal to check
> my environment and I find:
[...]
> XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/local/share:/usr/share:/usr/share/gdm:/var/lib/menu-xdg:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/:/usr/share/gdm/:/var/lib/menu-xdg/
> If in the LXTerminal I start a login bash shell with "bash -l" I get:
[...]
> XDG_DATA_DIRS=/home/patrizia/.guix-profile/share:/home/patrizia/.guix-profile/share:/home/patrizia/.guix-profile/share:/usr/local/share:/usr/share:/usr/share/gdm:/var/lib/menu-xdg:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/:/usr/share/gdm/:/var/lib/menu-xdg/
[...]
> Now the XDG_DATA_DIRS is fine.
> The problem is that the lightdm (and LXDE) XDG_DATA_DIRS is missing
> "/home/patrizia/.guix-profile/share" and this is the reason why
> applications installed with Guix are not listed in my menu.
Hi, you wrote a lot of other stuff that I have trimmed, but from
what I have quoted above it seems that your complaint is that
when you use a login shell you get a XDG_DATA_DIRS value
you want, and when you login via lightdm you do not.
Is that the entire problem that you want to solve?
If so, this suggests to me that your failure case occurs because you
are missing some aspect of ~/.profile from the good case.
Just a quick suggestion. From here
https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/amd64/guix/filelist
I see that the Debian guix package contains a file
/etc/profile.d/guix.sh
which looks to set XDG_DATA_DIRS similar to what you want.
The file can be seen here, note the last line:
https://sources.debian.org/src/guix/1.3.0-4/debian/guix.sh/
This is entirely based on guesswork by me, but maybe if you look into
it then you might discover that you need to arrange for
/etc/profile.d/guix.sh (or some of what it contains) to be executed
when you log in via lightdm.
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