xdm, xfce4 & xscreensaver
 

Hello,

I have made a small debian setup on an older machine, without GNOME/KDE, just with xdm and xfce4.2

I dont know where to put the command that starts xscreensaver on user login. I have no ~/.Xsession or ~/.xinitrc? (But xdm knows that it sould start xfce somehow. how?)
When I go to the xfce4.2 settings manager and to screensaver, it says, that "The XScreenSaver daemon doesn't seem to be running on display :0.0. Launch it now?"

Thats the way I start the xscreensaver daemon at the moment. :-)

I am confused by all various places of all the possible X startup scripts..

Any help appreciated

Stefan

usually, xfce4.2 should have installed ~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc which is the startup script for xfce4. If it's not there, the original should be in the directory PREFIX/etc/xdg/xfce4/ where PREFIX is whereever xfce4 is installed. This script should start the screensaver.

Also, you ca create a directory
~/Desktop/Autostart
and place scripts in here which will be run during the startup of xfce. It would be a possibility to start xscreensaver (don't forget the make the script executable).

If you continue to have problems with autostarting xscreensaver, you can quite easily create the .xsession file into your home directory. It should contain something like this: XDM will read this .xsession file and it's also customary to make it executable with "chmod +x ~/.xsession".
The Debian configuration system, debconf, keeps track of installed WM's/DE's and the one installed last will become the default. For instance, if you now install fluxbox, xdm will start fluxbox instead of xfce -- unless you "su" to root and run "update-alternatives --config x-window-manager" to change the debconf default. But this is a difficult command to remember, so it might be easier to create ~/.xsession and define the default window manager there because the settings in ~/.xsession will override the debconf defaults.

Thanks for the answers.

I have no xinitrc in .config/xfce4/ but I do have one in /etc/xdg/xfce4/. But in the latter is already this:

It seems it doesnt get executed.

By the way I installed the xfce4.2 packages from www.os-works.com.

Stef

edit: I just tried to find out what VNCSESSION is. "echo $VNCSESSION" as user prints nothing (I dont understand what "test" tests in the above line).

can you launch the xscreensaver manually once xfce is up? If you can, you should try the autostart option by placing a little script in
~/Desktop/Autostart/
the script should simply start the xcreensaver and nothing more.

Check out this post for a simply script to that you can use to manually start xscreensaver.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...69#post1520669

Brian1
" Google the Linux way @ http://www.google.com/linux "

In general, everything that you specifically define in your home directory overrides any system-wide settings. I'd still insist that creating a ~/.xsession file (like described in my earlier post) would be the easiest solution to your problem.

Yes of course, sorry. Your solutions all work, thanks.
I just asked myself why it didnt work with the /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc script in the first place.

Stefan

I don't have xfce currently installed on my system but I'd expect that if you study the system-wide startup scripts for xfce, you'll find that they first check out if there's any local startup scripts under the user's home directory (like ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsession).


The point I'm trying to make is: Any system-wide startup scripts usually check first if there's some local scripts under the user's home directory, and these local scripts usually override any system-wide settings.

Maybe it didn't work because /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc was not executed at all. If you launch Xfce session by running startxfce4 script, it will execute some xinitrc. It may be that Xfce was not started that way, because you did not choose Xfce session explicitly in display manager.