Chapter 11. Customizing Your X Environment

11.1.1. xinit

TIP: When using KDE, you will often have only one single command in your .xinitrc file: startkde. This is a shell script shipped with KDE that starts all necessary services. Your distributor might add other stuff to .xinitrc, though.

Here, we'll present a sample .xinitrc file for a bare-bones X system without any desktop environment and explain what it does. You could use this as your own, very bare-bones .xinitrc or copy the system default xinitrc as a starting point:

          1  #!/bin/sh
          2  # Sample .xinitrc shell script
          3
          4  # Start xterms
          5  xterm -geometry 80x40+10+100 -fg black -bg white &
          6  xterm -geometry -20+10 -fn 7x13bold -fg darkslategray -bg white &
          7  xterm -geometry -20-30 -fn 7x13bold -fg black -bg white &
          8
          9  # Other useful X clients
          10 oclock -geometry 70x70+5+5 &
          11 xload -geometry 85x60+85+5 &
          12 xbiff -geometry +200+5 &
          13 xsetroot -solid darkslateblue &
          14
          15 # Start the window manager
          16 exec fvwm2

TIP: A number of programs are started here; obviously, this will work only if you have installed them. If you go with the default installation of your distribution, chances are that either the desktop environment KDE or GNOME will be installed and these older programs will not be available. They should be on the distribution media, though, waiting to be installed. While you cannot have more than one window manager running at the same time, you can have as many of them installed as you like.

[40]All right, so it's not a work of art, but we needed something simple that would work correctly on most displays!

Figure 11-1. Screen created by sample .xinitrc file

Let's look at this in more detail. On line 5, we see that xterm is started with several options, -geometry, -fg, and -bg. Most X clients support these standard options, among others.

            xsizexysize+xoffset+yoffset

In this case, the option -geometry 80x40+10+100 puts the window at the location (10,100) on the screen (where (0,0) is the top-left corner), making it 80 characters wide by 40 characters high. Note that xterm measures the size of the window in characters, not pixels. The actual size of the window in pixels is determined by the font that is used.

Line 6 runs another xterm, although the arguments are slightly different:

            xterm -geometry -20+10 -fn 7x13bold -fg darkslategray -bg white &

First of all, the geometry specification is just -20+10. Without size parameters, xterm will use the default, which is usually 80x25. Also, we see that the xoffset is prefixed with a -, instead of a +. This places the window 20 pixels from the right edge of the screen. Likewise, a geometry specification of -20-30 (as used on line 7) means to place the window 20 pixels from the right edge of the screen and 30 pixels from the bottom. In this way, the placement of windows is less dependent on the particular resolution you're using.

On line 10 we start an oclock client, which is a simple analog clock. Line 11 starts xload, which displays a graph of the system load average (number of running processes) that changes with time. Line 12 starts xbiff, which just lets you know when mail is waiting to be read. Finally, on line 13 we do away with the bland gray X background and replace it with a flashy darkslateblue. (Fear not; there is more fun to be had with X decor than this example shows.)

You'll notice that each X client started on lines 6-13 is executed in the background (the ampersand on the end of each line forces this). If you forget to put each client in the background, xinit executes the first xterm, waits for it to exit (usually after you log out), executes the next xterm, and so on. The ampersands cause each client to start up concurrently.

            exec fvwm2

[41]If you have experimented with fvwm, you'll notice that pressing the first mouse button while the cursor is on the background causes a menu to pop up. Selecting the Quit fvwm option from this menu causes fvwm to exit.

In general, you should put an ampersand after each X client started from .xinitrc, and exec the window manager at the end of the file. Of course, there are other ways of doing this, but many users employ this technique.

The fvwm2 window manager was the default window manager on most Linux systems for a very long time. It is still around, but has mostly been superseded by either the very advanced kwin window manager shipped with KDE or one of the more modern freestanding window managers, such as blackbox or sawfish.

If you read the manual pages for xterm and the other X clients, you'll see many more command-line options than those described here. As we said, virtually everything about X is configurable. fvwm (Version 2) uses a configuration file of its own, .fvwm2rc, described in its manual page. (If you have no .fvwm2rc file, the system default /usr/lib/X11/fvwm2/system.fvwmrc is used instead.) More modern window managers still use configuration files, but usually provide you with user-friendly, GUI-based configuration programs that let you make your settings and then save them to the configuration file in the correct format. The manual pages, as well as books on using X, such as the X Window System User's Guide (O'Reilly), provide more information on configuring individual clients.