Change WM in runlevel 3

[portia]

Hi

I don't really want to boot into GDM as I sometimes don't need X. Apart from XFCE, I've got i3 WM. I've changed the default runlevel to 3 so that I can startx. How would I change the WM session from CLI?

Thanks

[smr54]

Create, in your home directory, a file called .xinitrc

Note the period in front of the name.

From there, put your window manager command, for example

exec (whatever xfce uses, for example, if the command is just xfce, exec xfce)

That is, for example, the command to start openbox is openbox-session, so my .xinitrc reads

exec openbox-session

but I'm not sure what command xfce uses.

[portia]

Ok thanks.

That's ok. I'll edit it manually. I thought there would be some script automatically populating .xinitrc together with some environmental variables passed to the session.

[sonoran]

Interesting problem. According to man startx, you can specify a client program as the first argument, which is run before .xinitrc or xinit. Using different shell scripts as client programs might be a way to accomplish what you want. For example "startx .starti3".

Have you looked at the qingy login manager? It's a runlevel 3 login manager that uses the directfb to put up a graphical login screen (highly user-configurable, which is why I like it) and offers a configurable menu of possible window managers and terminal sessions to start after login.

I don't think qingy is in the fedora repos at the moment, I last used it in fedora 11 or 12, but it shouldn't be too difficult to install in f14.

[PabloTwo]

I think you can do this in the /etc/sysconfig/desktop file.

With contents something like:

DESKTOP=KDE

or

PREFERRED=/usr/bin/startxfce4 (which is what is in my /etc/sysconfig/desktop file)

[portia]

Originally Posted by sonoran

Interesting problem. According to man startx, you can specify a client program as the first argument, which is run before .xinitrc or xinit. Using different shell scripts as client programs might be a way to accomplish what you want. For example "startx .starti3".

Have you looked at the qingy login manager? It's a runlevel 3 login manager that uses the directfb to put up a graphical login screen (highly user-configurable, which is why I like it) and offers a configurable menu of possible window managers and terminal sessions to start after login.

I don't think qingy is in the fedora repos at the moment, I last used it in fedora 11 or 12, but it shouldn't be too difficult to install in f14.

I'll try it. I can copy my Slackware's i3 xinitrc entry:

#!/bin/sh

userresources=$HOME/.Xresources
usermodmap=$HOME/.Xmodmap
sysresources=/etc/X11/xinit/.Xresources
sysmodmap=/etc/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap
userxdefaults=$HOME/.Xdefaults

# Merge in defaults and keymaps
[ -f $sysresources ] && /usr/bin/xrdb -merge $sysresources
[ -f $sysmodmap ] && /usr/bin/xmodmap $sysmodmap
[ -f $userresources ] && /usr/bin/xrdb -merge $userresources
[ -f $usermodmap ] && /usr/bin/xmodmap $usermodmap

# Start i3
if [ -z $DESKTOP_SESSION ]; then
    exec ck-launch-session i3 | /home/portia/.i3/dzen2script
else
    exec i3
fi

I just thought there would be something like Slackware's xwmconfig which is a simple ncurses DE/WM selector from the command line which generates entries like the one quoted above. It's not a problem though.

thanks