Exploring Software—Understanding a Netbook Desktop
The idea is simple. Once you sign in, a start-up program for the session runs the desired window manager, and typically displays the desktop icons using a file manager, and starts a panel. It then runs the components that need to be auto-started.
However, trying to understand the detailed flow reminded me of a comment I read many years ago, when I was trying to understand an Algol source file. The comment at the entry point said: “This is where you start. Where you end up is your problem!”
Let us then start at where we end up. You are more likely to be interested in controlling the components or applications that are run as soon as the session is started. A standard location for these is /etc/xdg/autostart. A desktop environment may, of course, change it. Anyone interested in more details can see the standards proposed by freedesktop.org (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications). Since you are likely to use a GUI, you don’t really need the name of this directory.
The keywords ‘OnlyShowIn‘ and ‘NotShowIn‘ can control the desktop environments for which a component is applicable. You can easily control the start-up applications for your environment by using a preferences option like Startup Applications in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, or on the standard GNOME desktop. The user-modified files will be in the .config/autostart directory in your home directory.
I was, however, interested in understanding what happens before you reach this point. A convenient starting point is the display manager. We typically use GDM or KDM. The display manager will usually rely on desktop files in /usr/share/xsessions and /etc/X11/sessions to offer a list of options available. The former is the common usage now, in major distributions including Fedora, Ubuntu and SuSE.
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