Issue with PANEL_FIFO variable

[joeyfurness]

Under Adding A Panel -> Configuration , setting the environment variable $PANEL_FIFO="/tmp/panel-fifo" doesn't point to a directory that exists. Does /tmp/panel_fifo need to be created ? or is that something that is created from one of the example scripts ?

When I echo $PANEL_FIFO i just get a blank output.

[joeyfurness]

I found a fix for the problem:

OS: Debian GNU/Linux 9.8 (stretch) x86_64
Model: VirtualBox 1.2
Kernel: 4.9.0-8-amd64
DM: lightdm

For anyone who is in a similar situation, lightdm does not read from .profile or /etc/profile. dm's like lightdm read from the Xsession configs, such as $HOME/.xsession and HOME/.xsessionrc (Both of these need to be created manually). When lightdm opens a new Xsession it will read from these and configure your session accordingly.

My solution was to create a custom script in Xsession.d (these are numbered and will execute in order) that sources /etc/profile with the following code . /etc/profile.

I then created a .xsessionrc file in my home directory and sourced .profile from there using . $HOME/.profile.

Hopefully this will help clear up some confusion for those of us using a dm like lightdm.