On 12-Mar-07 Eur Ing Chris Green wrote:
I thought I understood (vaguuly) the reasons for .profile and .kshrc or, for bash, .bash_profile and .bashrc but on this new Fedora system it doesn't work as I expect.
The system boots and runs gdm which allows me to log in and, as far as I can see, my .profile (or my .bash_profile) *never* gets executed. Surely it's supposed to get executed at least once when you first log in, but it's not getting executed here for me.
If I ssh into the system then the .profile gets executed (as expected by a 'login' shell), but isn't gdm (or kdm, or xdm) meant to do the login shell bit for you before starting your window manager?
-- Chris Green
I would certainly have expected so, since *dm certainly emulates a login when asking you for userid/passwd before starting up the window manager.
I've tried poking around on an old SuSE (which has kdm) with
locate dmrc
locate kdm | grep conf
without coming up with anything which made reference to login etc. So probaboy I can't help!
However, I would make the comment that very eary on I gave up on using a login display manager, since I simply didn't like it and didn't need it. I've always set things up to boot into the cosole prompt, where I can do a "primitive" login as root (drop back to it with Ctrl-Alt-F1 for scruff-of-the-neck purposes), plus one as ted from which I then "startx &". So by then I'm logged in and my .bashrc, .profile get executed. Plus, I know exactly where I stand!
Best wishes, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 12-Mar-07 Time: 16:29:13 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------