On 22-Oct-01 Ricardo Campos wrote:

I'm trying to get X up and running on my 20MB RAM, (512kb video RAM) laptop, and thinking of maybe using blackbox as a WM (although I suspect most of my work will be done in console mode).

I dont know if you have looked at icewm but it is very nice and I belive the lowest memory consumption of any feature rich window manager including twm and fvwm which comes in second. there is of cause the lwm or lightweight window manager but I find that just a little to light weight.

It's a RedHat 6.1 box, and currently defaults into Gnome for it's GUI. I want to ditch that in favour of a more lightweight GUI.

Where is the file that determines the default GUI when you log into X?

The system wide specification is something I cant help you with as its distribution specific but it may be '/var/X11R6/lib/xinit/xinitrc' but users can have a file in their home directory that will specify their window manager.

I recommend you read "The X Window User HOWTO" and you should find that bundled with your distribution or failing that on the web.

try typing

locate XWindow-User-HOWTO-5.html

which should find the files location and failing that

find / | grep XWindow-User-HOWTO-5.html

The same technique should work for locating xinitrc files on your system. Your users person configuration files are usually prefixed with a "." in the root of the users directory eg for user oms101 (me) on my computer the directory /home/oms101 (this is often stored as the variable $HOME) contains a files called .xinitrc. the contents of the file /home/oms101/.xinitrc on my system has been modified and customised and is probably not what yours should be like but is included to give you an idea of what can be set and is as follows

#!/bin/sh

#alow remote logins from fred

xhost +192.168.0.97

# Put KDE in the path PATH=$PATH:/opt/kde2/bin/ export PATH

cd $HOME

# # Sundry files # xresources=$HOME/.Xresources xdefaults=$HOME/.Xdefaults wmrc=$HOME/.wmrc xmodmaprc=$HOME/.xmodmaprc twmrc=$HOME/.twmrc xappl=$HOME/.xdefappl sshagent=/store/bin/ssh-agent sshid=$HOME/.ssh/identity

# # Load the resources # if [ -f "$xdefaults" ] ; then xrdb -load $xdefaults elif [ -f "$xresources" ] ; then xrdb -load $xresources else xrdb -load $xstuff/all.Xdefaults fi

# # Keyboard mapping # if [ -f $keymaps/$DISPLAY ] ; then xmodmap $keymaps/$DISPLAY fi

if [ -f $xmodmaprc ] ; then xmodmap $xmodmaprc fi

#set back ground colour

#xsetroot -solid 'medium slate blue' xsetroot -solid rgb:00/50/60

#set energy friendly

xset dpms 1800 3600 5400

#set windows fonts #xset fp+ unix/:7101 # No longer needed as already on font path

cd $HOME/home

# change icewm preferances To Normal # cp $HOME/.icewm/preferences.normal $HOME/.icewm/preferences # removed as icewm now launched with comandline option

exec icewm > /dev/null 2> /dev/null

You may find you cant see your .xinitrc file in your by typing

ls -al

in the appropriate directory. If this does not show the file then no .xinitrc file is present then X will use its system wide xinitrc file. The last line specifies the window manager by the way.

exec blackbox

could replace it to make that your default window manager. Infact that could be your .xinitrc file as mine contains loads of stuff you pobably wont want.

Oh and I nearly forgot if you dont have a .xinitrc file be sure to make the file executable

chmod u+x .xinitrc

The issue gets confused slightly as some systems use a .xsession file which is essentially identical to a .xinitrc file but specific to graphical logins

Regards

Owen

PS Most of this information is available in the HOW TO that I mentions before and its written better.

Date: 22-Oct-01 Time: 14:43:42