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Starting fluxbox
There are two ways to start X. Running startx from a console (ie textual) login or from a graphical display manager (DM) such as gdm, xdm, kdm, lxdm, xfdm etc etc.
I like to add a .xsession session to my DM configuration by dropping xsession.desktop into /usr/share/xsessions/xsession.desktop which starts $HOME/.xsession
My .xsession file starts up a number of things that the default 'fluxbox' startup omits such as D-Bus, ssh-agent etc etc.
startx(1) will normally execute a script called $HOME/.xinitrc and I find it convenient to have my .xinitrc script just call my .xsession script.
When fluxbox starts up it executes .fluxbox/startup which I like to customise so that it's the same on all my machines but which adapts to each machine dynamically. Mine is here: startup