What makes X sessions restorable ?

lalebarde

Hi all,

This is a newbbie question

. What makes X sessions restorable ? I mean document toto.odt opened in desk n°2 p. 123, Terminal opened in desk n°9 with two tabs, one working on ~/Documents/tsomefolder, and the other one on ~/Images/anotherfolder, three Firefox windows, the one with the gentoo topics in desk n°9, the one with cooking in n°1, etc (as far as I know, Firefox reminds its windows and tabs, but does not know in which desk to put them).

Is it the display manager xdm, gdm, slim, etc), the desktop one (kde, gnome, xfce, etc) ?
In the case of XFCE, what shall be tuned ?

I am not sure, but in the old times I setup my Gentoo, I think I understood that it was the DM, and choose gdm for this feature. Is it correct ? If yes, does slim do the same now (the doc is not clear for me) ?

CrankyPenguin · Apprentice Joined: 19 Jun 2003 Posts: 283

When you say "restorable" do you mean after a reboot you want everything as it was or do you mean that when you open up a given application, say Firefox, that it goes to a set place?

If the former I suspect what you really want is suspend to disk which will handle all of the system maintenance. If the latter some window managers such as fluxbox can make apps sticky and you can start up specific applications on specific desktops in the .xinitrc or in .fluxbox/startup
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szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3137

Both, kde and gnome used to have a feature allowing you to save your session and resotre it later (including open tabs in konqueror).
Unfortunately, this requires some cooperation from all applications involved so you're not likeky to be able to do it yourself in other DE.

Suspend to disk is not application (or even runlevel) speccific, so you can actually give it a shot and hope for the best.

lalebarde · Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 7:54 am Post subject:

I have tryed SLIM gm with XFCE: sessions are restored. Actually, all applications do not cooperate. But I have my answer, it is not the gm task.

Concerning suspend to disk, I used it several years ago, but it sucked at this time. What happened is that it worked once after a reboot, but failed quite always the second time. The documentation did warn it was very touchy to tune, there was no general rules except trials.

Does it work fine now? Without having to study documentation during three days and having to perform tuning during three other days at least ?

CrankyPenguin · Apprentice Joined: 19 Jun 2003 Posts: 283

I can't answer for suspend-to-disk now. I know people who have it working and it is, I believe, well-supported by Gnome and KDE apps but as to getting it working without days I am not sure. I don't have enough free time to try

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Linux, the OS for the obsessive-compulsive speed freak in all of us.

uraes · Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2014 6:22 am Post subject:

Don't know exactly which app is dealing with this session info, but you can find configurations (for KDE) about windows and their states in "~/.kde4/share/config/session" directory. I have done some cleaning there if some programm was messed up.

i92guboj · Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2014 7:00 am Post subject:

The responsible for this is called "session manager", and it's a component of your desktop environment (provided you use one at all). The modus operandi varies quite a lot from one session manager to the next, and, in any case, no session manager can tell e.g. firefox which tabs to re-open. Whatever that happens inside the firefox window is responsibility of firefox, and no one else's.

Most SMs just save commands and associated window positions, and when restarting just re-launch everything and put them wherever they were when the session was saved. Some of them provide a way to save sessions manually, some others just save it when exiting automatically. Some are configurable in this regard, some aren't.

Also, when it comes to window positioning some behave better than others. Most applications use the standard way to do their things, and instruct the WM to position themselves in the desired place (which the WM can override for sane reasons), but some other windows use ugly tricks or don't respect the EWMH at all making the work of the WM and the SM much more difficult.

The session manager is often the one that loads basic DE stuff, like password rings, settings daemons, desktop search engines, plugins, consolekit session attachment (for automounting et al if you are into that) etc. But nothing is truly carved in stone in this regard.

In xfce there's a thing called xfce4-session. Both gnome and kde has their own as well, though I don't remember the names right now. Most basic WMs don't do session management at all, though you can always setup them to launch app1 in desktop1, app2 in desktop2 and maximized in the left half, app3 in desktop2 right half, etc. Fvwm provides some kind of session management stuff, but I never looked into it, really.

I find it much easier to have several shell scripts that will setup my environment in about 1 second for a new task. Then I can bind them to an icon or a keycombo, and can modify them instantly in nano rather than diving into a dozen config dialogs just to change session or something like that. A big plus is that this is DE-WM-independent