Just for comparison, I have the following situation: I have a desktop computer running natty. I use it mostly myself, and I prefer xmonad with no desktop environment. Sometimes other family members log in; they use the off-the-shelf Unity desktop environment. Some of them are children, with the requirement that Internet access be disabled by default when they log in. We have gdm as the login manager. To keep Internet access under control, I uninstalled network-manager and nm-applet completely and use the traditional init.d script. The network connection is wifi; it's a fixed access point, so it's hard-coded in /etc/networks and the init.d script brings it up just fine. One problem I have when running without a desktop environment is that evil gnome applications tend to invoke each other silently behind the scenes. That can lead to a system crash even from non-gnome applications. For example, when I click on a link to a PDF in Google Chrome, if the PDF has "rich" features in it Chrome opens it in Evince. That in turn quietly launches gnome-screensaver in the background. Well, I already have xscreensaver running, so the next time I leave the computer idle for a few minutes, it freezes. I use .xsession for myself, whereas other users do things the usual Unity way. For my own xmonad session, I wrote a custom .desktop file for it that invokes a shell script rather than xmonad directly. The shell script just sources my .xsession and then execs xmonad. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
And GDM seems to require almost all of Gnome installed nowadays (which is why I uninstalled it and went with lxdm)
Interesting. Do you think lxdm might work better for me? It certainly would be better from the point of view of my own desktopless session, but gdm is a better fit for the other users. I did have to fight with gdm a bit to get things set up right, but now it's working OK. I have all of the gnome dependencies installed anyway for the Unity users. Thanks, Yitz