[conspire] launching LXDE :-)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (pazander at pacbell.net):

> First I found several dead ends:

Not a complaint, but I _did_ recommend the thing you didn't elect to do:
switching to lxdm.  ;->  (I recommended giving up on Lightdm, though as
is my custom I wasn't pushy about it, figuring you can make up your own
mind.)

Anyway, one of the happy bits of news is that, in Linux desktop space,
even something as messy as the X Window System is nicely modular, so you
can pick your own preference in display manager (the graphical login
tool) _and_ window manager (optionally with DE stuff wrapping it).
You're not locked into any one of those, regardless of what your distro
provided by default.

The Debian/Ubuntu family of distros (thus including the two Linux Mint
flavours, Aptosid, Siduction, elive, Crunchbang, MEPIS,  etc.) is
particularly good at packaging that modularity and preventing any one
choice from locking you in.

> Following that advise, this is what I did:
> 
> root> update-alternatives --config x-session-manager

Yeah, that makes sense.

As I was saying, the root user[1] in Debian/Ubuntu family distros has
access to extremely useful adminstrative functions via the various
update-* utilities.  Of those, update-alternatives is a really nice one
whose role in life is to allow the administrative user to manage the
/etc/alternatives tree.  Do have a look at /etc/alternatives, as you'll 
find it very enlightening.  It consists of symbolic links.

So, for example, if you type 'vi', which program gets executed?  It's
going to be /usr/bin/vi, which on Debian/Ubuntu you'll find to be a
symbolic link to /etc/alternatives/vi .  But wait, that's not the clever
bit.  /etc/alternatives/vi is, in turn, also a symbolic link, and _that_
(second-level) symbolic link is the one that the update-alternatives
command manages.

Why?  Because there are multiple implementations of the vi editor
avaiable in open-source Unixes, and several of them are each pretty
Despite my careful effort not to be pushy, I do have some notable
prejudices that I'm sure poke through more than a bit, and one of them
is against software that is _poor_ at being modular and interchangeable
because it is from projects and organisations that think they deserve to
rule the world.  I tend to classify both Canonical/Ubuntu (and thus
Lightdm) and Freedesktop.org/GNOME in that category, and lean towards
alternatives.

Anyway, 'update-alternatives --config x-session-manager' will selecdt
which X Session Manager is specified as default at the _system-wide_
gglevel.  Whether X display managers such as lightdm honour that depends
on whether they are written (or maintained by the distro package
maintainer) to Play Well with Others, aka obey the distro policy.


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