Brandon, Thank you for your input, which is consistently concise, relevant and useful. Though it *is* rather cruel of you to bombard me with lots of useful information just before I *should* be retiring for the night :-) Brandon Allbery wrote:
Display managers use ~/.xsession
Command line uses startx, which is a wrapper for xinit, which uses ~/.xinitrc
That's sort of the impression I had, but it's good to have it confirmed. Should I worry about the distinction between startx and xinit? Given that my Oneiric seems to be running LightDM, I'm trying to stick with that for now. I don't want to close my session (which contains too much useful state (Tangential queston: Any hints on good session-saving/restoring tools for XMonad?)), so I'm trying to start a second LightDM on a second X server, to test out trial configurations. ps reports that LightDM was started thus: /usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch so I try sudo /usr/bin/X :1 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:1 -nolisten tcp vt8 -novtswitch This gives me completely black screens. Any ideas how to run a second LightDM on a second X server? Orthogonal question: I seem to have added an XMonad session definition for LightDM by creating files such as /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/xmonad.session and /usr/share/xsessions/xmonad-unity-session.desktop I did this by copying some examples, and even managed to customize them a bit my stumbling around in the dark. Any hints where to find documentation on these files? Should I write such a file to get LightDM to start a non-Gnome XMonad session ? They don't seem to be LightDM-specific, so would they work with other Display managers? Thanks very much for all your help.