On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 1:50 PM, XeCycle wrote:

Jorge Almeida writes:

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It seems that xmodmap requires being run from an emulator inside an X session, which it's not supposed to.

I'm afraid not.  For me, I'm running it like this:

.xinitrc: #!/bin/sh metacity & wmpid=$! sleep 2 xmodmap ~/.xmodmaps & # other commands wait $wmpid

It works for me.

Thanks. It may be an openbox thing, but then you started your wm before other stuff. Any special reason for that? Why not exec into metacity in the end, rather than keeping .xinitrc waiting? And why backgrounding xmodmap? I suppose I should try all possibilities, but it remains the mystery: why running from the console doesn't work? Jorge Almeida

On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 2:19 PM, wrote:

FWIW, icewmbg, which is supposed to be run before icewm (according to the documentation); or which is supposed to be run by icewm-session; fails for similar reasons ($DISPLAY is not set and X is not running) unless I first run icewm, open a terminal window and then run icewmbg.  For me this is not a big deal because I run icewm in order to run lean and clean and if I really want to see that background photo, I can run xfwm4.

I suppose that is a quirk of icewm. I set my background in the same script that is supposed to run xmodmap, and the background is really set. On the other hand, I put an "echo $DISPLAY" in the same script, just to check that the display is set, and it gives the expected output. As for X, the script is the client of xinit, and besides the other X-related tasks get done, only xmodmap fails. J.A.