Best way to start GNOME

[Felix Bellaby <felix pooh u-net com>]

Rodrigo Moya writes:
 > My .xinitrc file looks like this:
 > 
 >     icewm &
 >     exec gnome-session
 > 
 > I'm using GNOME 0.30. Is this the best way to start it, or, as I've seen in
 > some posts on the list, is there a better way?

Drop the "icewm &" line. 

The icewm will register with gnome-session when it starts up and
request that gnome-session restarts it at the start of the next  
session. With your set up this means that icewm will be started
twice and you will get a "WM already running, exiting..." error
printed off into where ever your errors go during an X session.

I personally prefer to start X using xdm / gdm rather than going
through the xinit stuff. This usually means that the X start up
script is called .xsession rather than .xinitrc. 

However, you can get xdm to start up the X session in exactly 
the same way as a terminal session by including the following
line in your xdm-config file:

DisplayManager*session:		/bin/sh -login

(I do not know the precise equivalent for gdm).

This means that all the scripts which are called for a 
terminal login are called for an X login as well and you
can start gnome at the end of your ~/.profile with the
lines: 

if [ "$DISPLAY" ]; then
exec /usr/local/bin/gnome-session
fi

Felix