Huh, I think I was asking the wrong question then. I don't really want to do all the things that are done in my .xinitrc file. I noticed, though, that (for instance) my .Xresources are ignored inside the xnested xmonad, so I have to do xrdb ~/.Xresources again to get them to work right (presumably because xnest is running X on display 1, not 0). Similarly, I have to do "xsetroot -solid black" again to get a black background. So I put these commands in my startup script like this: #!/bin/sh Xnest :1 -name "xmonad" +kb -ac -geometry 1152x768 2> /dev/null & XNEST_PROC=$! DISPLAY=:1 xsetroot -display :1 -solid black xrdb -display :1 $HOME/.Xresources /usr/local/bin/xmonad& XMONAD_PROC=$! wait $XMONAD_PROC kill $XNEST_PROC but the xrdb and xsetroot commands did nothing. However, if I did it like this: #!/bin/sh Xnest :1 -name "xmonad" +kb -ac -geometry 1152x768 2> /dev/null & XNEST_PROC=$! DISPLAY=:1 /usr/local/bin/xmonad& XMONAD_PROC=$! xsetroot -display :1 -solid black xrdb -display :1 $HOME/.Xresources wait $XMONAD_PROC kill $XNEST_PROC it works fine. I don't know why this is -- does xmonad have to be running in order for the xsetroot and xrdb commands to take effect? Why should that be? Mike Stefan O'Rear wrote:
On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 11:34:42PM -0700, Michael Vanier wrote:
I'm not ready to switch to using xmonad 100% of the time yet, so for the time being I'm running it using xnest. The problem I'm having is that I don't know how to get xmonad (or xnest) to read an initialization file (e.g. a .xinitrc file) in these circumstances. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Neither your window manager nor your X server is supposed to *ever* touch .xinitrc; this is the responsibility of your display manager, or if you do not use one, the server driver program. For instance, untested:
startx -- /usr/bin/Xnest :1
will load your .xinitrc file in the context of an Xnest on display 1.
Stefan