Bash does not do the normal login process in non-interactive login mode unless it is forced with the -l option.Because a command is specified with the -c option, the shell is also run in 'non-interactive mode'.The - option invokes a 'login shell' by prepending a dash (-) to its name.X:5:once:/bin/su - PREFERRED_USER -l -c '/usr/bin/startx /dev/null 2>&1' Your session will also not be authorized as 'local' by ConsoleKit, so you will be unable to shutdown/suspend/reboot or mount drives without using sudo or su. Note: This method will not use /bin/login or register your session, therefore no session will appear in who or w. In order to avoid this, remove the exec part from the script. The user will be logged out when X is killed. *) printf '%s ' 'Please answer y or n.' ) exec xinit - /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp vt7 Read -p 'Do you want to start X? (y/n): ' Or with additional checking (if tty1 ( Ctrl+Alt+F1) shows an error message): #exec xinit - /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp vt7 If you use zsh as your preferred shell, add the following lines to your ~/.zprofile instead.): Both will execute ~/.xinitrc, which may be customized to start the window manager of choice as described in the xinitrc article.Īn alternative to a login manager is to add the following to the bottom of your ~/.bash_profile (if ~/.bash_profile does not yet exist, you can copy a skeleton version from /etc/skel/.bash_profile. To manually start X, startx or xinit are used. The inittab way allows automatically starting X without supplying a password. The bash_profile method will start X once logged in from a tty. This article introduce two methods without display manager. The majority of users use display manager to start X server. As Daffy Duck might say to me, 'You're despicable.Covers bash_profile and inittab methods to start an X server during the boot process. Often they grow quite silent, unsure what to say or think. I also mischievously enjoy watching other people watch me boot my computers. For me that means one less layer of complexity. I'm an old fart and I like booting to console. About 90% of the time that is what I want but 10% of the time I don't want to do that immediately. I wrote my own /usr/local/bin/bash_login script that is sourced by $HOME/.bash_profile and my script prompts if I want to boot into the desktop with startx. I've long grown comfortable with that and to this day still boot all of my Slackware systems to console. Way back then display/login managers were available, but the default was booting to console. There also is a cosmetic reason in that the users would be fully WTF bewildered by logging in at the console and then manually typing startx.Īt home I have been using Slackware for more than 15 years. I'll let others pipe in to help.Īt work I configure the Debian workstations and laptops to use a display/login manager because outside very specific tasks, the users are not command line users. There is much more to distinguish the differences. The common way to do that these days is storing *.desktop files in /etc/xdg/autostart or $HOME/.config/autostart. automatically launching apps at login is a common desire. Whether the desktop is launched from the console or a display/login manager. Some display/login managers support sourcing those files but consult the documentation. Generally, the system and user xinitrc files are used when launching the desktop from the console. Users may override many of those options through a local $HOME/.xinitrc file. The file is sourced from the startx launch sequence. Usually the system /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc file contains global instructions for creating the graphical environment. With this traditional boot, launching a graphical desktop and X is done through the /usr/bin/startx shell script. In systemd parlance this is called multi-user.target. In traditional parlance, depending on the distro and init system, this was called runlevel 3. In systemd parlance this is called graphical.target.īefore booting into a graphical environment became popular, traditionally Linux systems booted to the console. In traditional parlance, depending on the distro and init system, this was called runlevel 4 or 5. Generally, display/login managers are used when booting into a graphical user environment.

Startx vs xinit