On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 17:11, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte <rdiaz02@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:32:00 +0100,Jacek Generowicz <jacek.generowicz@cern.ch> wrote:
> Ramon Diaz-Uriarte wrote:

> > I have nm-applet and trayer working fine. I launch trayer and nm-applet
> > from .xinitrc,

> Now here is something where I'm completely lost: How do I choose
> between .xinitrc, .xsession, startx, xinit, X, gdm, lightdm etc. etc?

These are fragmentary notes (from fragmentary knowledge)

I've always used .xinitrc, though I think some display managers want to
see an .xinitrc; in some places I've read the advice to create a symbolic
link (i.e., ln -s .xsession .xinitrc). But I could be missing some details.

Display managers use ~/.xsession

Command line uses startx, which is a wrapper for xinit, which uses ~/.xinitrc

It is common to link them together, but that isn't always the right thing to do; ~/.xsession usually needs to do some of the stuff in ~/.profile (or ~/.bash_profile if you must) does, since it's not being launched from a login shell. Always doing the prifle stuff removes the possibility of setting a custom PATH that might be necessary for certain applications but that might conflict with other applications (matlab and some other commercial packages tend to do this...).

brandon s allbery allbery.b@gmail.com
wandering unix systems administrator (available) (412) 475-9364 vm/sms