[TriLUG] re: Switching desktops

jeremyp at pobox.com jeremyp at pobox.com
Mon Sep 24 13:55:48 EDT 2001


On Mon, 24 Sep 2001, Rob Carlson wrote:

> Easiest way is to go into $HOME/.xinitrc file, go to bottom and comment 
> out <pathtostartKDE> and uncomment or insert <pathto>gnome_session...

That would work; I think you're really supposed to use ~/.Xclients instead
of ~/.xinitrc however. I believe that xinitrc works if Xclients doesn't
exist, and vice versa.

I have only the following line in ~/.Xclients :
exec /usr/local/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/gnome-session

ssh-agent is a really cool utility that allows you to cache private keys;
this way you can use RSA/DSA authentication for remote logins, and use a
password with the private key.  I only have to type the private key's
password once after logging in (with the ssh-add command).  ssh-agent uses
process inhertiance to allow access to the private key, so that's why it
needs to be the parent process of gnome-session, as shown above.

That tangent aside, I think the original question was how to change the
desktop on a system-wide basis.  That answer is found in
/etc/sysconfig/desktop on a Red Hat system; I don't know about others, but
look in /etc/X11/xinit for how "xinit" works. (xinit is the program that
"startx" calls.)

--Jeremy




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