[xmonad] Going Gnomeless (and Unityless on Oneiric)

[Brandon Allbery]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 18:08, Jacek Generowicz <jacek.generowicz at cern.ch>wrote:

> > 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?
>

Not really.  Most of the time, startx is what you want; xinit may be useful
if you're doing something like running an Xvfb or Xnest instead of a normal
X session, and don't want the usual X setup.

sudo /usr/bin/X :1 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:1 -nolisten tcp vt8
> -novtswitch
>

That's going to start an X server running nothing and with no way for
anything else to connect to it; not very useful.


> Any ideas how to run a second LightDM on a second X server?
>

Display managers are usually designed to support multiple sessions; that
is, instead of running a separate display manager for each display, you
have a single display manager which manages multiple displays.

It also appears that LightDM documentation is nonexistent.
https://answers.launchpad.net/lightdm/+question/179211 is about how to
manage multiple displays; while it gives a recipe, it also notes that the
only way to work this stuff out currently is to read the source code.  :/

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?
>

http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html-
*.desktop file specification.

The session files are the same format, and are supposed to be / work the
same whether used from gdm, kdm, lightdm, etc.  The Xmonad on Gnome FAQ
contains a sample .session file.

-- 
brandon s allbery                                      allbery.b at gmail.com
wandering unix systems administrator (available)     (412) 475-9364 vm/sms
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/attachments/20120116/b95c18e2/attachment.htm>