Xfce Forum

bp787

Member

Registered: 2013-03-25

Posts: 1

trouble setting xfce as default desktop on RHEL 6/CENTOS 6

I have been doing kickstart installs of RHEL and CENTOS 6 via kickstart.  Gnome works fine.  if I manually install xfce and select it from gdm, xfce works fine.

However, if I install xfce during the kickstart (@xfce during the install section) alongside gnome, I get the error:

Unable to load a failsafe session 

Unable to determine failsafe session name.  Possible causes: xfconfd isn't running (D-Bus setup problem); environment variable $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is set incorrectly (must include "/etc"), or xfce4-session is installed incorrectly. 

I have modified the following files:
/etc/X11/xinit/Xclients:

GSESSION="$(which gnome-session 2>/dev/null)" 
STARTKDE="$(which startkde 2>/dev/null)"  
STARTXFCE="$(which startxfce4 2>/dev/null)"

# check to see if the user has a preferred desktop 
PREFERRED= 
if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/desktop ]; then    
 . /etc/sysconfig/desktop 
    if [ "$DESKTOP" = "GNOME" ]; then
         PREFERRED="$GSESSION"
     elif [ "$DESKTOP" = "KDE" ]; then
         PREFERRED="$STARTKDE"
     elif [ "$DESKTOP" = "XFCE" ]; then
         PREFERRED="$STARTXFCE"
     fi
fi

/home/user/.dmrc also created

[Desktop]
Language=en_US.utf8
Session=xfce

/etc/sysconfid/desktop:

DESKTOP=XFCE
DISPLAYMANAGER=GNOME

I also removed the /usr/share/Xsessions/gnome.Desktop file, leaving the xfce.desktop file only.  Still, I get the error above.

The only way for me to continue is to uninstall xfce and reinstall xfce.

Permissions on  home/user/.config are file (all readable and owned by user:user. 

Permissions on /etc/xdg are owner by root:root but readable by user.

I have /etc/gdm/custom.conf set to autologin user:

[daemon]
AutoLoginEnable=true
AutoLogin=user

The only thing I'm doing to customize xfce is to overwrite the /etc/xdg/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml files with ones I have customized.  I'm going to remove that from the kickstart and re-install to see if that's an issue, but I really don't think it would be.

I really would like to leave gnome physically on the system.  I also know that I could remove GDM (in this case I'm not really needing it), but for some installs, I do need it.  Besides, I'm new to xfce and would really like to understand what is not working here.

Thanks for any input!