1. log out from your X session by pressing a button on your screen. This is a button that appears on your screen when you log into xdm. When you press it, it logs you out of the session. You need to have a file called .xsession in your home dir that starts the logout button in the foreground and your window manager in the background. By putting other things in this file, you can do things like change your background to your favorite image, start a clock and/or a terminal window, or even add a rotating earth or fish tank! You can start any number of programs as long as you background them. An example of .xsession is in /usr/doc/logout-button/examples and if you edit it choosing your favorite window manager, it will try to find and use it. Remember to place it in ~you/.xsession and make it executable. If you don't edit it, it will try to find and use the fvwm2 window mgr. X infrastructure has a mechanism which waits for some program to exit indicating the user wishes to end his X session. logout-button is the simplest form of such a "session manager". The example .xsession file provided in the doc/examples directory picks a window manager to run, starts it in the background, optionally starts other clients (xterm, xearth, xfishtank) also in the background and finally starts the session manager (logout-button) in the foreground, replacing the process and process ID belonging to the shell interpreting the .xsession. Because the infrastructure of X is waiting for this process to exit, when logout-button is pushed, the session is ended. From Debian 3.0r0 APT