[tlug] Running without Gnome/KDE/xfce/whatever. (was: Ubuntu 16.04-LTS Japanese Text Input)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > Interesting. So how do you handle starting things like dbus (normally
 > started by the sesion manager) that various applications need,

Some applications will start it for you, or you can start it "by hand"
in your .profile (or /etc/profile, for that matter).  I suspect that
many distros' default startup scripts for X will start dbus when the
window manager is started if it's not already running, too.

In Debian (last I looked, they may have been polluted by Ubuntu-isms
by now), basically what happens is that when the X server starts, it
runs a program (defaulting to xinit still, IIRC), and that program
does some stuff and then tries to run /usr/bin/x-session-manager, if
that fails it tries to run /usr/bin/x-window-manager, and if that
fails it runs an xterm or something like that.  It does some other
stuff depending on what worked and what didn't.

I think dbus probably gets run somewhere in there on Debian.  There's
too much s**t that barfs, spasms, and dies if dbus isn't available
(why?)

 > and how do you handle display of things like input method and
 > NetworkManager icons?

Icons are just windows as far as the X server is concerned.  A button
bar is just a very specialized window manager.  I don't bother.  Erm,
on second thought, I do all my input via XEmacs, and I manage my
network with ifconfig and route -- maybe those icons don't work
without a button bar, I wouldn't know.  But the icons I use do.