Comments on: XMonad on Ubuntu

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sat, 14 May 2011 19:06:29 +0000

Great post.

I have one suggestion to the startup scheme. Instead of putting all your startup configuration in /usr/local/bin/xmonad.start, change it to just start the same named file in your home directory, e.g.

$ cat /usr/local/bin/xmonad.start
#!/bin/bash

exec ~/.xmonad/xmonad.start

Then put everything you had in that file into the one in your home dir.

This way all accounts on the same machine can have their own xmonad setups.

By: Stephen Paulger

Stephen Paulger — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:38:03 +0000

In ubuntu 10.04 $HOME/.xession is only run if the argument passed to /etc/gdm/Xsession is “xcustom” (it is “xmonad” when you’re using xmonad).

By: Gerald Sears

Gerald Sears — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 03:08:23 +0000

I have xmonad installed from repos and it came up in my gdm automatically, no changes needed, just needed to select it in the drop down menu.

Still working on customizing it, though, getting a status bar and background are the two major things for me. Then I’ll try to get some nice effects and a little subtle eye-candy going and work on fitting the keystrokes to my tastes. Also need to figure out how to work with my second head(monitor), I don’t think it will be that hard, just haven’t had time to play around with it enough to figure it.

By: Martin

Martin — Sat, 08 May 2010 14:28:25 +0000

Thanks to you I finally managed to get the Xmonad setup that I have on Debian Squeeze on Ubuntu 10.04 too!
Please note: If you use a custom xmonad.start that lives in your home folder you have to specify the full path in the /usr/share/xsession/xmonad2.desktop. (Obvious, right — but I forgot it
Also: If you want gnome-panel and gnome-settings-daemon, put them BEFORE the xmonad line in your xmonad.start. BTW: it seems that on Ubuntu 10.04 neither .xinitrc nor .xsession are read by gdm.
– Cheers, Martin

By: Joey

Joey — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:06:22 +0000

gdm does not run ~/.xinitrc, but it will run ~/.xsession. I simply symlink the two files to not have to worry about how X was started.

(If you start xmonad this way, you will want to start gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-panel manually from your ~/.xsession.)

By: oberhamsi

oberhamsi — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:50:51 +0000

the comment above has bad advice. this will have strange results regarding gnome-session-settings, etc. do it the – not much harder – right way for maximum xmonad pleasure

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:34:40 +0000

If you want to trivially use XMonad with your gnome desktop in ubuntu you can just edit .gnomerc :

export WINDOW_MANAGER=${HOME}/bin/xmonad