ACK! Enlightenment took over. WTF?

[Badfrog66]

When I installed Mandrake, I decided not to have the GUI started automatically, wanting instead to explore a bit.

I backtracked through the startx scripts and found that drake looks for a default window manager in /etc/sysconfig/desktop, so I started dumping in names of different wm's - fvwm2, afterstep, wmaker, etc - intending to try them all, and quite pleased that I'd done my first Linux hack. :-)

Everything worked fine through the first 6 or so tries, until I tried enlightenment. Didn't like it, tried to change back to kde. Now, whatever I do, regardless of which wm is called out in /etc/sysconfig/desktop, enlightenment starts when I do startx.

Yuk! Can anyone help please?

[NGene]

There should be a file .xinitrc in your home directory. Put there the name of your preferred wm and do startx. Do you still get Enlightenment?

[Badfrog66]

There is no .xinitrc in my home. (yeah, I know it'd be hidden http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/wink.gif)

what should .xinitrc look like? The file I'm editing is simple, it just contains the name of the win mgr to load. Would the same thing work with .xinitrc?

This whole arrangement is *completely* different from what I was expecting, after reading a little about X configuration in man and in the book I bought, so I'm a little confused - is this standard for Mandrake or did I do unintentionally do something weird when I installed?

Not having a .xinitrc in my home, I started with /etc/x11/xinit/xinitrc and discovered it doesn't load a window manager - it instead does an

exec /etc/X11/Xsession

first thing, then has a section labelled
# start coolicon ...

So I read thru /etc/X11/Xsession and found somewhere (can't find it today) a call to another script that did a grep on /etc/sysconfig/desktop looking for different window manager names to see which one to load. Thats the file I was editing, and it worked great until I tried enlightenment.

I rebooted a few times, being out of constructive things to try, and, somehow, I'm back in K again. But now I'm a little afraid to experiment with the other win mgrs!


[This message has been edited by Badfrog66 (edited 14 January 2001).]

[NGene]

I don't know what is standard for Mandrake and what isn't because I've never used it, but if that .xinitrc file doesn't exist, just create it into your home directory. If you want to use KDE, you could add line startkde in there, for WindowMaker it'd be wmaker and so on... if there are some programs you want to start when X is started, just add them into .xinitrc, too.

Hope you'll get things working now. Just go and experiment with the window managers! http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif

[tminos]

A typical .xinitrc file looks like this:


#!/bin/sh
exec <window manager name here>

For your it would be

#!/bin/sh
exec enlightenment

Mine is

#!/bin/sh
imwheel -kp &
gkrellm &
Eterm --trans &
efm -dir /home/tminos
exec enlightenment