Just thought I would share this in case people didn't know it could be done or found it useful.

I run twm as my main desktop and boot in to a command prompt on runlevel 3. Once there and logged in I can select the session I wish to run by varying my startx command thus:

First off I have a .bash_profile:

#!/bin/bash
# .bash_profile

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
source ~/.bashrc
fi

to pick up my .bashrc that contains this section:

# startx
alias startx0='startx ~/path/to/xinit/files/xinitrc0'
alias startx1='startx ~/path/to/xinit/files/xinitrc1'
alias startx2='startx ~/path/to/xinit/files/xinitrc2'
alias startx3='startx ~/path/to/xinit/files/xinitrc3'
alias startx4='startx ~/path/to/xinit/files/xinitrc4'

xinitrc0 to xinitrc4 have varying contents.
0: has the default twm desktop configuration, untouched from installation runs one xterm, nothing else, full screen.
2: runs a full desktop, opening everything I need for programming, multimedia and sysadmin.
3: opens a just few programming apps.
4: opens a web browser and a couple of other bits and pieces.

Typing startx* on login logs me in to the relevant session depending what I'm after. The above are just examples, you could make them what you like, adding as many as you like. It doesn't depend on you running twm, your default DE could be anything (as far as I understand, someone here may know more), just that you boot up to the command line. All you have to do is edit the various xinitrc's according to what you're after.

I do find it really useful and definitely prefer it to being dropped in at a graphical login. In fact I'll quite often select startx1 as I can quickly fire up a browser or whatever from there. (Getting a full screen xterm was just trial and error on the geometry numbers).

Hope this helps someone.

Thanks for sharing.

Glad it works for you; a poor man's version of Activities in KDE, but with all the fun of extra X restarts.

Or you can login on different virtual consoles and switch between environments with ctrl-alt-F*.