[GRLUG] Deskop Managers

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 16:29 -0500, John J Foerch wrote:
> Lee Forest writes:
>  > In Ubuntu. or at least 8.10 I can't find the inittab file to edit
>  > whether or not I want graphical login. Plus I guess I would have to
>  > freshen up on how to configure startx to load the window manager I
>  > want....I believe it was the .xsession file in the home directory?
>  > this is something I haven't done since my slackware days. course
>  > ubuntu seems to have switched things around(god knows why) definitly
>  > wouldn't be hard tho. I've done much more complex tasks. I just have
>  > to figure out what ubuntu replaced those files with. But there was
>  > mention of wmii. Anyone concur with this being a good replacement for
>  > gdm on ubuntu 8.10? I've never actually heard of wmii before so its
>  > new to me.
> On my debian system, I run X with the xinit command, and my startup
> script is ~/.xinitrc.  Perhaps someone can explain the difference
> between startx and xinit?

startx
------
The  startx  script  is  a  front end to xinit that provides a somewhat
nicer user interface for running a single session of the X Window
System.  It is often run with no arguments.

xinit
-----
The  xinit  program  is used to start the X Window System server and a
first client program on systems that cannot start X directly
from /etc/init or in environments that use multiple window systems.
When this first client exits, xinit will kill the X server and then
terminate.

Usually startx is considered more correct / kosher than using xinit
directly.