On 10-Jun-98 Charles A. Peters wrote:
> I have downloaded the fvwm port from the freebsd ftp site, but I do not know 
> how to get it to load when I run startx.  I know that I'm missing something 
> simple, but I have worked on this for several hours with no success, any 
> suggestions?
        startx is just a small shell script that will invoke xinit, 
which will start up the X server and also run another little shell 
script called xinitrc. xinitrc is typically used to start up a few
X clients, including your window manager. This is the guy you need
to change. I don't know where it's kept on FreeBSD systems - maybe
someplace like /usr/X11/lib/X11/xinit/ - look around for it.
        Somewhere near the bottom of xinitrc you should see a line 
that invokes whatever window manager you're currently using, so change
that to invoke fvwm (or fvwm2) instead.
        If you want to get a little fancier, you can replace the line
that starts your WM with a small loop that will keep your X session 
(and all your apps, usually) alive in case you accidentally terminate
your WM, and allow you to recover. Here's a snippet from my xinitrc 
that I've used for years:
WM="fvwm2"
while [ "$WM" != "Quit" ]
do
  $WM
  WM=`xmessage -name "Quit X" "Really quit, or restart WM?" \
  -buttons "Quit,fvwm2,olvwm,piewm,9wm,kwm" -print`
done
        In this example, the other WM choices are simply various window
managers that do not interact gracefully with FVWM's Restart function.
You might want instead to give yourself a choice of restarting FVWM or
your old WM, in case FVWM isn't set up properly and fails to come up
on the first try. Good luck!
 
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Received on Wed Jun 10 1998 - 20:37:47 BST