[SOLVED] LXDM and Other Catastrophe's

Question

Compared to the arch-fu practitioners here I'm a total noob so bear with me . And sorry if this has been solved before, I searched but found nothing.
My second attempt at installing Arch was going kind-of smoothly until I got to configuring LXDM. No matter what I do it keeps logging into the default X session (twm) rather than my wm's (openbox/scrotwm). I tried fiddling with lxdm.conf and /etc/lxdm/Xsession only to break it completely (login loop). I also tried this to no avail. I even tried symlinking~/.Xsession to /etc/lxdm/Xsession, which made no difference. So I'm assuming I have to modify /etc/lxdm/Xsession in some way?
All this messing about (4 days and counting) and other niggling configs I've borked (shutdown and reboot break with ata2 errors, acpid to blame?) has got me considering ArchBang (Blasphemy!) and modding from there. But then I saw how many gnome bits it has, I don't want to load the entire gnome library for no good reason and I assume removing all of it would be a pain?
Last edited by seaneking (2012-02-20 22:45:27)

Answer 1

"$1" is a special variable, known as Positional parameters, they are basically the commandline parameters.
For example:
myscript some option another_option
<--$0--> <$1> <-$2-> <-----$3----->
<---------------$*---------------->
<---------------$#----------------> # Number of Arguments, in this case $# = 3 (doesn't include $0)
More info on bash/shell scripting can be found on Greg's wiki
In the mean time...
So I downloaded LXDM and I'm at a loss. I have no idea where it's finding the various window managers (including non-existent ones, and in some cases not at all). The only file which exists on my system sourced within /etc/lxdm/Xsessions is "/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc", which, even though it's the same as the skeleton file, doesn't merge my X[defaults|resources]. Yet it seems to use some commands from my ~/.xinitrc such as feh background setting.
Documentation is... sparse (.dmrc?)
Edit:
Giving up, hopefully someone with more experience/knowledge can help. Sorry
Edit2:
Right. It seems that the list of WMs/DEs is actually built from .desktop entires under /usr/share/xsessions/. (I know you mentioned this already)
So if you want to add i3, simply drop an i3.desktop file containing something like:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=i3
Exec=i3
Checking the source indicates that LXDM seems to only look for the "Name", "Exec" and "Desktop Entry".
Edit3:
Okay, reinstalled LXDM and tested this theory. Made a bogus.desktop file under /usr/share/xsessions and used the following contents:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Bogus
Exec=wmii
Logged out, started LXDM and sure enough, I had a new entry named "Bogus" which launched wmii. I didn't alter any config files at all. (brand new install)
PS: Bedtime!
Last edited by Earnestly (2012-02-20 02:27:32)