Why would xfce4-panel suddenly not be started at boot/login?

[Chris G]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 07:20:09AM -0800, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Jan 2010, Chris G wrote:
> 
> >So it's the session manager that 'remembers' to run xfce4-panel.  What if
> >one has turned off the session remembering, does that mean one loses
> >xfce4-panel, that seems a bit wrong to me.
> 
> Chris,
> 
>   If there was no session manager the system would have no idea what you
> wanted to display when you started X. After all, you could have icons (for
> that Microsoftish look) or a taskbar rather than a panel. There is a
> plethora of Xfce options and the system doesn't know what you prefer unless
> you store those preferences someplace. The session manager is such a place.
> 
Yes, I realise that, but *some* parts of the X GUI have to be started
up *always*, otherwise you'd see a blank screen with no way of
starting any applications.  I was just meaning that it feels like
xfce4-panel is such a fundamental part of the xfce desktop that it
should always be started.

If xfce4-session isn't running then xfce4-panel is one of the things
that's started up automatically by xfce4's xinitrc file.

Are there not some things that xfce4-session will start up even if
they haven't been saved in a previous session?  There must be some
sort of default initial set of things that xfce4-session starts up.

>   Even with all this, I find that some applications just do not
> automatically invoke, others do most but not all of the time, and the rest
> are restored to various virtual desktops consistently. Shrug.
> 
It's one of the reasons that I liked fvwm as a window manager, you
could start everything you wanted up from fvwm's configuration file,
say which screen you wanted it on, etc. all in one place.  No need for
saving sessions and/or devilspie etc.

-- 
Chris Green