E17 User Guide/Starting from the command line

It's quite easy to start E17 from the command line. Just fire up your favorite text editor (like Vim, Emacs, Nano, whatever) and edit the file /home/<username>/.xinitrc. (notice the dot in the name of the file). Then write “enlightenment_start” or even better, full path to the enlightenment_start executable. It depends on your system, but we will give an example with the default settings. By default, when compiled Enlightenment is installed in /usr/local/. So your .xinitrc file should look like:

/usr/local/bin/enlightenment_start

However, if installed elsewhere, the path can be found with:

which enlightenment

This searches the locations defined by the environment variable PATH. To echo your path, run $PATH. If enlightenment_start is installed in a nonstandard location and not in $PATH, use your favorite file-search tool (ie slocate -i enlightenment_start, after creating a slocate database) to search for the binary. Once found, it might be a good idea to add the location to the path variable, to make calling e17 commands more convenient. For example, if enlightenment_start is located in /opt/e17/bin, it can be appended to the current instance of bash using 'export PATH=/opt/e17/bin:$PATH'

Also, it is a good idea to start Dbus with E17's session. To do this, put the following line in the .xinitrc file:

dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/local/bin/enlightenment_start