{"id":5815,"date":"2020-07-11T11:57:40","date_gmt":"2020-07-11T11:57:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=5815"},"modified":"2020-07-11T11:57:43","modified_gmt":"2020-07-11T11:57:43","slug":"re-enabling-xsession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=5815","title":{"rendered":"Re-enabling .xsession"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So I am currently messing around with a tiling window manager on my laptop – I prefer tiling window managers in general (I use Awesome<\/a> on my main desktops). These are (in general) not “desktop environments” but just manage windows (and sometimes a “status bar”). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it happens the window manager I’m messing with doesn’t come as part of a distribution package with a pre-prepared file for GDM3 to use. So I created a ~\/.xsession<\/em> file – something that has worked since display managers first arrived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Didn’t work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turns out that I need to “hack” GDM3 to make a long standard bit of functionality functional again. As an aside (and especially to the GNOME people), all you had to do to keep this functional was detect if someone had a ~\/.xsession<\/em> file and then offer that up as a menu option. Not that difficult to do and even if it isn’t your preferred way of doing things, it’s a nice thing to do for us old-timers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, to restore this functionality all it took was to create a file in \/\/usr\/share\/xsessions\/ <\/em>called xsession.desktop<\/em> with the following contents :-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Desktop Entry]\nName=XSession\nComment=This session uses the custom xsession file\nExec=\/etc\/X11\/Xsession\nType=Application\nDesktopNames=GNOME-Flashback;GNOME;\nX-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=gnome-flashback<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Dead simple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And yes I stole this and adapted it myself – I’m putting this up here so that I know where to look when I need it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I am currently messing around with a tiling window manager on my laptop – I prefer tiling window managers in general (I use Awesome on my main desktops). These are (in general) not “desktop environments” but just manage windows (and sometimes a “status bar”). As it happens the window manager I’m messing with doesn’t […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4,209,226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it","category-linux-it","category-working-notes","category-4-id","category-209-id","category-226-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-1vN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5816,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5815\/revisions\/5816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}