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["Daniel Richard G." <skunk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: xdm

I'm reporting this against xdm 1:1.1.8-6ubuntu2 in Lucid, but this bug
may be relevant to gdm and x11-common as well.

I've found at least two major differences in the environment
initialization performed by gdm vs. xdm when a new session is launched:

1. /etc/gdm/Xsession will read in /etc/profile, /etc/xprofile,
~/.profile and ~/.xprofile . No such initialization occurs with xdm. You
notice this if you (for example) add $HOME/bin to your path in
~/.bash_profile.

2. gdm sets XDG_CONFIG_DIRS in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/60xdg_path-on-
session; xdm does nothing of the sort. I've found this to be a problem
when using xdm with the Xubuntu desktop (by setting
"DisplayManager*session: /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession
/usr/share/xubuntu/session.sh" in /etc/X11/xdm/xdm-config). When
XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is unset, you get a regular Xfce desktop (single taskbar
at bottom, app menu at bottom-left) instead of the Xubuntu one (taskbar
at top and bottom, app menu at top-left).


It is a bug that xdm is not interchangeable with gdm as far as the login session is concerned, but it's less clear how the two should be made equal in this respect. Modifying xdm's Xsession scripts to do the same thing would be the simplest solution, but then the same bug may arise with other display managers. I believe a better solution would be to move the above two bits of setup logic out of gdm, and into x11-common, to make them a common denominator of all display managers. (The 60xdg_path-on-session scriptlet is not from upstream, so that bit would be easy. Alas, /etc/gdm/Xsession is not ours.)

** Affects: xdm (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

-- 
Does not perform same environment setup as gdm
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/583634
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