To start off with I assume it actually has a name on the process table?

It's your display manager. I can't tell you off the top of my head what it is called, and you probably had a choice of display managers on install so you're going to have to figure that out.

You should find something within your process table via the PS command.

If not, open up a window with top and then open up a window running something heavily graphic. The process you ran should pop to the top of top. Along with the display manager and possibly multiple other processes. Work your way up the process tree with the parent processes to determine what the top level process is if you can. If not, you may need to monitor a bunch of different ones.

Hey box: I haven't thought about this stuff for 8 years. How am I doing? Got a list of possible display manager names he should be looking for?


And you can't tell from where it launches?

Find (using the find command or locate if that's installed) every file less than 50K on the root/ boot systems ( And if you can't figure that, just tell it not to traverse network links, hopefully you won't waste time going through too many files ) and grep it for that text. You will find the launch script somewhere. The launch configuration file. You will find at least one and possibly multiples.

At that point, you can typically insert the strace command before the actual command.