session management

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1

Hello people, I read this article. found it it google.

I was wondering what the advantages or disadvantages are when using session management.
The article explains what it is and how to use it, but not exactly why this is usefull.

any links related to this? or can someone tell me why I should use or nog use it?
does it uses more resources when using sessionmanagement?

Johan

2

Well, this part of the article kind of sums it up:

Personally I don’t really care about saving my windows’ size and position, if they need to be fixed I write function for them that puts them where I want them on startup… :slight_smile:

Thomas might have to add some things to this, it’s his article after all :slight_smile:

3

Ah, so my past writings come back to haunt me, huh? :slight_smile:

I’d have said that was an intuitive aspect of session management, and not something that would have needed explaining. However, reasons why you might use it are:

  1. You want to pick up from where you left off.
  2. You run a kiosk-type system, and having the state of those applications load each time is paramount.
  3. You don’t want to have to manually load, or otherwise tell the session manager the applications you want to load each time you login.

See above. There’s no hidden uses behind it, or catches. It’s funny – for my dissertation due to start this academic year, I am going to try and base it around session management – looking at its uses, and where it can be improved.

Does what use more resources? A session manager works by registering itself with the window manager. Applications then have to identify themselves to it in much the same way, so that the session manager knows about them, their state, and what to do with them. But it isn’t continually cycling the CPU or anything. It kicks in when one logs out, primarily.

Does that help?

– Thomas Adam

4

thanks, that explains a lot. :slight_smile:
Don’t think I really need that, as I don’t need to be able to continue where I left off and I don’t really have some specific windows that I like to be somewhere specific.

about the resources, I thought the session manager was an extra program running in the background which causes some memory and cpu usage. guess I don’t completely understand this ‘registers itself with the windowmanager’, but never mind. I won’t be using it anyway. (might also just be a misinterpretation of a foreign language :confused:)

Johan

5

You’re welcome.

Well, as my article does describe; with some session managers, you can tell it to ignore certain windows from registering – but you’d have to know beforehand that this is what you wanted.

You mean like any other program? :slight_smile: Well, yes, of course.

I will explain it if you want, but unless you know something of the ICCCM, Xlib, and session management in general, it really would be a very dull read. :slight_smile:

– Thomas Adam

6

Hmm, I have a basic knowledge of a few programming languages, but I never heard of ICCCM and never thought about what Xlib is, so you don’t have to explain it :wink:

Johan