On Mon, Feb 17, 2025 at 09:27:19 -0600, David Wright wrote: > On Sun 16 Feb 2025 at 00:56:50 (+0000), Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote: > > Yes. I called evince from the command line in an xterm running under fvwm. > > I also call up the xterm and fvwm from startx (via ~/.xinitrc) when I log > > in. > > Perhaps now moot, I think that's an unusual X start-up. For example, > I can't find any reference to .xinitrc in /etc/X11/, as opposed to > .xsession.
~/.xinitrc is the traditional (read: obsolete) file used by startx. In Debian, ~/.xsession is preferred for both xdm and startx, in an attempt to unify the two. I think it's succeeded fairly well, at least for people who *only* run Debian, and don't share their HOME directory with some other OS where startx doesn't read ~/.xsession. If you do share your HOME directory across multiple OSes (and use startx), you probably want to make ~/.xinitrc a symlink to ~/.xsession, or vice versa. I'm not aware of any systems where that would cause problems. hobbit:~$ grep -r xinitrc /etc/X11 /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc:# /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc:# global xinitrc file, used by all X sessions started by xinit (startx) hobbit:~$ less /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc #!/bin/sh # /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc # # global xinitrc file, used by all X sessions started by xinit (startx) # invoke global X session script . /etc/X11/Xsession
