[xmonad] Going Gnomeless (and Unityless on Oneiric)

[Jacek Generowicz]

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.