Starting a Window Manager
When the idea of a graphical system for Unix was first introduced, there was a basic (very basic) graphical screen, based on what some of you will recognise as xdm. That is all well and good, but for those of us that like the CLI (Command-Line Interface), you can use:
startx
to force a normal console-login to start your desired window-manager. Graphical login managers use the underlying configuration file:
~/.xsession
While startx uses:
~/.xinitrc
Although, if no ~/.xinitrc file is present, startx will read ~/.xsession quite happily.
Initially (unless you have added one to /etc/skel/), these [continued…]