I was feeling good a couple of hours ago. I have my desktop all set up and pretty, all the apps I need installed, and SLiM set up to boot into FluxBox (I'm on Slackware 13.37 by the way).

Well, for root at least.

I guess I kind of got carried away with setting everything up for root, but now that pretty much everything's configured the way I like it, I'm adding a user account I can use for everyday stuff. I ran the 'adduser' script fine, and went through my root home directory and copied all the configuration files (the dot files) into the user home directory. Then I rebooted and tried to log in through SLiM and got a "Failure to Execute Login Command" when I used my new user login. So I looked it up on Google, and the only solution I could find was to change the "login_cmd" line in /etc/slim.conf to use the bash shell instead of 'sh'. But mine was already like that. So I decided to reinstall the SlackBuild, hoping that it would update around the new user. Nothing.

After another unsuccessful hour of googling, I was out of ideas and patience and decided it was a permissions problem, so I went in and added user read and execute permissions for all the dot files in the user home directory. This affected it, but not really in a good way. Now when I log in as the user, I get a fake FluxBox desktop, which turns white if I try to execute any command in the terminal. All I can do is enter the 'exit' command, which closes the fake FluxBox session and reveals a fake root FluxBox underneath, which I can't do anything from either.

Soooo...I guess this is a long, convoluted and overly explanatory way of asking how one is supposed to add a new user to SLiM.




P.S. If you don't know already, the "S" in SLiM stands for "simple". Ouch.

I think I would remove the user from the system, & start over.
Add the user, home directory, password, etc.
Log in as the user, then copy in the setup files from root's directory.
(I use Debian, but have used Slack when I started with Linux)
This may or may not work, but 'I' would try it.

1 members found this post helpful.

You should copy the default files from /etc/skel if they don't exist when the user is created, not sure if thats the problem though i would reccomend reading throguh this:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Slim

The configuration is identical to the slackware package, have you tried using the .xinitrc method?

1 members found this post helpful.

When you add a user their new home directory is normally populated from skel, that was why I suggested logging in as user, before copying root's files.

Well, I remember trying the xinitrc copy method before and it not working (actually I copied all the dot files from root including Xauthority), because my skel directory has nothing in it.

But for other reasons, mostly my hard disk layout being less than ideal, I went ahead and did a complete reinstallation on a better hard disk partition, and this time I added the user before doing anything else. It was still by no means automatic but for whatever reason it works now when I copy the .X files to my home directory. So you were both right! Thanks.