Greetings everyone! This is my first time visiting these forums, but I've been using Linux for three years, so I'd like to think I'm a newb only in terms of post count. Then again I still have lots to learn, but only so much as everybody else does.

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I first started using KDE 4 last month when I installed SimplyMEPIS 11.0 on my computer. It was the only distro based on Debian Stable I could find, all the others are all "rolling" distros based on Testing. Prior to this I had been using plain ol' Debian stable (the only .iso that would fit on a CD, because it included no window manager), and had installed all the packages I wanted after the fact. However I was unhappy with this, because I didn't feel like compiling a kernel module just to get sound working, and having to install packages all the time because I would go to launch a program and realized that I hadn't yet installed it, and was expecting it to be there because it had been included in the last distro I used.

But then I was given another old computer that was being thrown out. Lo and behold, it had a DVD drive! I put it in my PC (bringing up the number of donor computers taken to build my current machine up to a grand total of three) and burned the SimplyMEPIS 11.0 .iso on a family member's computer (it was only a DVD reader, not a burner).

I was highly impressed with KDE 4! I am a minimalist at heart, but I genuinely believe that it makes Linux look better than it ever has before.

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As much as I love KDE 4, it hogs too much of my 512mb of RAM! So I installed the Awesome window manager (my favorite), and simply run an Awesome session instead. However, there is one feature I want to enable from the KDE session, without actually running the aforementioned full-fledged KDE session: I want all the windows I had open at shutdown to come up automatically when I reboot again, just like when I was running the full-fledged KDE session.

It doesn't make sense to run a whole KDE session when I want just this one feature. I've tried simply setting the KDEWM= environment variable and using Awesome over top of KDE, but it didn't reduce RAM usage as much as I would like. Especially considering I really only want that one session-remembering feature.

Ultimately, my question is this: How to I enable this one feature at startup?

I thank you wholeheartedly in advance for your gracious help!

Perhaps you'll find this info useful.

Thanks, it was rather helpful. However, I don't think that quite answers my question, because I need to know what to autostart. I don't necessarily want to always launch the same set of programs every time at startup. Rather, I want to automatically relaunch whatever windows I had open when I shut my computer down.

I looked into my problem a little bit more, and I think that the program that does this is called ck-launch-session. If I autostart this command, will it remember my session on next login? I couldn't find anything definitive on what exactly ck-launch-session is.

Thanks again!

I think this is not something you could pick from KDE. You'd have to search for a solution for awesome... I'm using awesome too, but I don't know of such a tool. I'm pretty sure you could write it in lua yourself, tough.

I was under the impression that it was indeed possible, because when I am in an Awesome session, I can run the command "Plasma-desktop", and plasma will run just as if I logged into a KDE session from the get-go.

I'm sure I could write something in Lua, but I am unfortunately not a programmer and have no time to learn, being a full time student.

However, assuming my theory is incorrect and I cannot simply autostart whatever KDE uses for session managing, are there any other options besides learning Lua? Is there a package in the Debian repositories or maybe elsewhere that would suit my needs? I am confident in my familiarity with Debian based systems, so I'm willing to follow relatively advanced instructions in achieving my goal. However, I don't want to dramatically increase my RAM usage, and that would be the only thing I really want to avoid.

Thanks yet again for your helpful input.

This functionality is provided by a Session Manager, with KDE's implementation known as "ksmserver". It is usually the root application of all sessions. Therefore, I think this would be very hard to make work under Awesome, as it will by default go through the motions to bring up most of a full KDE session.

Have you tried disabling KDE functionality such as Nepomuk and Akonadi (which will be too much for a system such as this)?

No I have not, actually. I've been using htop to monitor the RAM usage,and I can see that those two services use a good portion of my RAM. However, I figured it would be better to simply disable everything and only enable what I need, instead of trying to disable everything I don't want, when I only want the session managing feature.

However, if it is so difficult to enable just this one feature, I will reconsider if the effort is worth any perceived benefit and instead just resort to using awesome's built-in autostart feature. That is, unless there is some other KDE-independent session managing package that I don't know of?

EDIT: Thanks anyways for all the help, even though I didn't reach the desired outcome.