Different Users - Different GUIs
 

Hi Folks,

I think that this is my first post although I have been a reader for
some time. Says alot about the many, many answers I have found
in this group. Keep up the flow.

I run a local PC at home, not networked, with family member users
and running Slackware 9.1 booting to Bash.

Question 1of2:

Is it possible for different users to use different GUIs?

That is to say: Dad likes Xfce, Mum likes Gnome, Daughter likes KDE etc.

If this is so, startx is syswide, so I would imagine that a
startx style script would be the key in each users home directory
to start their own flavour of GUI.

Again, if this is so, what code should I include in the script.

Question 2of2:

From the console one can log in a number of times via tty*.
Given that a user is in a GUI session, can one run other GUI sessions.

Eg. Dad is running a Flushbox session and Daughter wants to jump into KDE to do what ever.

Look forward to your answers and thank you for taking the time to respond.

If root runs 'xwmconfig' is gets set for all users. But then each user can run 'xwmconfig' themselves to select their default GUI. Plus there are other ways of working around having to use 'xwmconfig' at all, but it's the most direct and easiest way.

Oh, missed part 2. 'startx -- :1' will start a second xsession on tty8 - and so on.

Yet another edit because maybe more commentary would be helpful: 'startx' is a wrapper for 'xinit' but the key thing you want to configure is ~/.xinitrc. What xwmconfig does in simplest terms is move an /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.{WM} to ~/.xinitrc. The problem with that (if I understand it correctly) is that any changes made to the users ~/.xinitrc will be lost when they switch GUIs again - a fresh new system-wide xinitrc.{WM} gets copied in and overwrites it. Root can make the edits to xinitrc in the /etc directory but that's kind of pain. I think it's easier just to create an ~/.xinit and put your own xinitrc.{WM}s there and use a simple shell script to symlink ~/.xinitrc to one of them when you feel like it.

But anyway - xinitrc is the run control file for xinit, which startx serves as a wrapper for. And the personal version of that is what you'd mainly want to deal with. :)

If you use runlevel 4 with the kdm graphical login it will provide a menu where you can choose what kind of 'session' you want to run (e.g. which window manager you want to start)

go to /etc/X11/xinit and copy the file you want to the users home directory as .xinitrc
or else create your own .xinitrc file
e.g.
cp xinitrc.xfce /home/dad/.xinitrc
cp xinitrc.gnome /home/mum/.xinitrc
cp xnintrc.kde /home/daughter.xinitrc