.Xdefaults and xfce4

[Harry Putnam]

Olivier Fourdan <fourdan at xfce.org> writes:

> HArry,
>
> Xdefaults and other Xresoures is unrelated to xfce.

Well, after looking things over a little more, I see that while that
is true,  it is a somewhat misleading statement.
The install instructions tell you to us startxfce4 where (on RH) you would
normally use startx.  By by-passing startx, it effectivly sidesteps
code that has been around a long time and integrates things like
.Xdefaults into the play by calling other scripts as it executes.

In previous releases of xfce, it was called by some of the stuff
startx or xinitrc does.  I used to have a call in ~/.Xclients (which
was sourced or Exec'ed by xinit) to start xfce(3X). Now it effectively
supplants those programs whatever set of scripts and function calls
that many OS's have in place.  So consequently, stuff that would be
taken care of if startx and xinitrc were not bypassed is left undone
or left to whoever installs xfce4 to figure out how to take care of
it.

> You may want to do a
>
> xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults
> xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources
>
> in your $HOME/.xfce4/xinitrc

That seems to be a way to handle some of what SYSTEM/startx and
SYSTEM/xinitrc did.  Thanks 

> Please note that recent Xaw and Motif apps should be able to load
> Xdefaults value w/out requiring loading them with xrdb.

Can you explain that a little more if you have time?.  How does this
loading occur?