James Thanks. Your post made me think about xinitrc and I found that the one from Slackware had different paths to sysresources & sysmodmap! I should have checked that before. I copied over the system xinitrc, modified it and now all is well. On that WINDOWMANAGER export you mentioned, logging out & back in won't change it. A reboot does but better yet I find that running SuSEconfig does log in the change to /etc/profile. Then a log out/in does find the $WINDOWMANAGER OK. Your solution is much better tho. Leave profile alone and just use your .xinitrc. I wouldn't have even looked at profile if MY OLD(!!) .xinitrc had worked. Thanks! Wayne Subject: Re: [S.u.S.E. Linux] Running SuSE Linux Date: Sun, Feb 01, 1998 at 08:20:32PM -0800 In reply to:James C. Carr Quoting James C. Carr (jccarr@nwlink.com):

On Sun, 1 Feb 1998, Michael Perry wrote:

...

Another interesting thing with kde and SuSE 5.1 here. If I edit .xinitrc in my home directory to reflect exec kde I get kde but not the actual guts of kde. I get the windowmanager only but no functionality, if you know what I mean. I can only change windowmanagers by changing it in /etc/profile, logging out, and letting my profile be read again. I would like it if someone would explain how /etc/profile sets the windowmanager and why it cannot dynamically be changed. It seems to change the windowmanager one must edit /etc/profile, change it there, then logout and enter the console again. Is this correct, in essence?

If I understand /etc/profile, the file gets read during every log on. This would require you to log off then back on to have /etc/profile re-read. However, if you're just looking to do something minor, like setting the WINDOWMANAGER variable, then you just need to use :

export WINDOWMANAGER=startkde (for KDE use)

Because KDE is something of a Window system (and not just a window manager), it's easier to use the startkde script; that'll give you the kpanel, kfm, and the desktop. Or one could edit the .xinitrc and call all three individually (kpanel, kfm, and kde, that is). So, if you're looking to modify X for just one user, you could go either way :

1) Edit /etc/profile and specify WINDOWMANAGER

2) Edit $HOME/.xinitrc and specify things there

Since I'm not too familiar with SuSE just yet, I don't really on WINDOWMANAGER for any of the WMs that did not get included with SuSE. For example, to use WindowMaker, I call wmaker from .xinitrc; to use AfterStep, I rename my .xinitrc and export WINDOWMANAGER=afterstep.

Hope this helped,

-- James

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