I have several window managers that I use on various occasions. However, I don''t like to use any bloated login managers like kdm. With a bit of research, I discovered that you can pass a window manager as an argument to startx. Unfortunately, I found that I have to type in the full path - i.e. startx /usr/bin/openbox . Two of the WMs are in /usr/bin, one is in /opt/kde3.2.2/bin (I think). Both of these directories are in my $PATH. Is there someway I can avoid typing in the whole path to my window managers? Zorx (a Puzzle Bobble clone) Discontinuity (an animation system for POV-Ray)

You can always put it in a simple script in your homedir and run it from there. That can be even faster than typing ''startx''.

That''s a good idea - thank

Zorx (a Puzzle Bobble clone)
Discontinuity (an animation system for POV-Ray)

By default, startx looks for the script file ~/.xinitrc. Here you can put whatever commands you wish to be run upon starting X.

quote: Original post by Strife
By default, startx looks for the script file ~/.xinitrc. Here you can put whatever commands you wish to be run upon starting X.

I know that...the problem was that I wanted sometimes one set of commands to occur and sometimes others.

Zorx (a Puzzle Bobble clone)
Discontinuity (an animation system for POV-Ray)

or - put an alias in ~/.bashrc

alias openbox="startx /usr/bin/openbox"

or whatever, then you can just type openbox to start openbox (you''ll probably have to log out and log back in again

But, both fluxbox and xfce4 have the commands startfluxbox and startxfce4 (in /usr/bin) (I''m assuming that this means openbox will have a startopenbox command), and gnome has the command gnome-session. I think kde just needs you to type kde-3.2 but I don''t have it installed so I''m not sure

The alias idea isn''t bad, but I''m afraid that there startion and startopenbox commands don''t exist, and while startkde does exist, it expects a functioning X environment and needs to be passed as a parameter to startx

Zorx (a Puzzle Bobble clone)
Discontinuity (an animation system for POV-Ray)

quote: Original post by clum

quote: Original post by Strife
By default, startx looks for the script file ~/.xinitrc. Here you can put whatever commands you wish to be run upon starting X.

I know that...the problem was that I wanted sometimes one set of commands to occur and sometimes others.

Zorx (a Puzzle Bobble clone)
Discontinuity (an animation system for POV-Ray)

Well then, quite frankly, you''re SOL without doing work on your part. Whenever I wanted to change something, I''d just quickly comment out the parts I didn''t want and uncomment what I did want. It''s not really that hard. You''re best bet may very well be simply writing aliases for whichever window manager you''d like to use.

startx `whereis openbox`

?

one better

#!/bin/bash
startx `which $1`