[xmonad] xmonad as a stand-alone?

[Brent Yorgey]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 10:50:17AM +0200, Christopher Svanefalk wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I am rather new to "manually" setting up a desktop environment, so please
> bear with me.
> 
> I would like to be able to boot my system straight into xmonad, without
> having to have any particular desktop environment installed. Currently, I
> run LXDE and am able to choose xmonad as my wm, but LXDE is of course still
> present, and I would like to be rid of it. My goal is a "clean system" based
> only around xmonad and any other packages I need to get it running.
> 
> How could I accomplish this? What config files would I have to fiddle with
> to get it running, and what other packages would I need apart from
> xmonad?

This is what I do.  I just run xmonad from my ~/.xinitrc which is run
by X on startup.  I do not have a display manager running; when my
computer boots up it just drops me into a shell prompt, and from there I
type 'startx' which starts X and xmonad.  Using a display manager so you
boot directly into xmonad is not too hard either.

-Brent