Re: [tlug] X11 Session Manager Setup

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-10-30 12:15 +0900 (Thu), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Curt Sampson writes:
> 
>  > First, there seems to be no way to manage multiple sessions. Am
>  > I missing something here?
> 
> What do you mean by multiple sessions?

Multiple "states of the desktop." For the background of how X session
management works, see:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_session_manager

> I guess what you mean is having different sets of apps available, and
> that is normally handled with virtual desktops.

No; a session would be the state of everything running on all the
desktops. This is restartable; if I save my session, logout, reboot the
machine, then log in again and restore that session, all the apps will
be restarted in the state in which they were before. (Or with as much of
that state as they cared to preserve.)

You may not have been aware of this, but if you're using the standard
gnome desktop, the panels with your menus, etc. (gnome-panel), the
window manager that adds the title bars and lets you resize things
(metacity), and many of the other programs that you see when you logged
in are not started from a startup script, but are a restoration of a
saved session. If you kill gnome-panel (you may have to set it not to be
auto-restarted by the session manager, first), save your session, log
out and log in, you'll find that gnome-panel is still no longer there.

Having spent the past little while learning about session management in
these new whiz-bang environments, I've discovered that even most Linux
"sysadmins" that I talk to have no clue what's really going on below the
surface of the desktop they use every day.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com