xprofile

/etc/xprofile and ~/.xprofile allow you to execute commands at the beginning of the X user session, before the Window Manager is started. Therefore it cannot be used to start window-based applications. See Autostarting#Graphical for that.

Compatibility

xprofiles are natively sourced by KDM (/usr/share/config/kdm/Xsession), GDM (/etc/gdm/Xsession) and LXDM (/etc/lxdm/Xsession).

Making it compatible with xinit

It is possible to make xprofiles compatible with these programs:

• startx
• xinit
• XDM
• SLiM
• any other Display Manager who uses ~/.xsession or ~/.xinitrc

All of these execute, directly or indirectly, ~/.xinitrc (usually copied from /etc/skel/.xinitrc), or /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc if it doesn't exist. That's why we have to source xprofiles from these files.

~/.xinitrc and /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc and /etc/skel/.xinitrc

#!/bin/sh

# Make sure this is before the 'exec' command or it won't be sourced.
[ -f /etc/xprofile ] && source /etc/xprofile
[ -f ~/.xprofile ] && source ~/.xprofile

...