Installation

Extract contents in your home directory or make symbolic links to this directory. Warning: This overwrites your .xsession. If you have you a custom .xsession or some other X init script, insert contents to .startup/x/session

Setting up Zsh

set ZDOTDIR=~/.startup/zsh in /etc/zsh/zshenv (if writable) or ~/.zshenv

Setting up any another shell

I don't have support for any other shell, but you can use the infrastructure. If its possible for the shell, try to push all configuration into a subdirectory of ~/.startup. Though this is not necessary, it gives some sense of uniformity.

For POSIX shells, the following three shell fragments can be used in ~/.startup:

env: Initializes environment variables rc: Does init for an interactive shell logout: Finalizes on exit from a login shell

env is needed once per login, even to graphical systems, like in .xsession. login situations for shell arise when:

1. Using the text login from one of the virtual terminals
2. Switching privileges, like su
3. Remote login, like with ssh

You could source this from your .profile, .bash_profile etc.

rc is needed for all interactive shell invocations. You could source this from .bashrc, for instance.

logout is needed only when logout from a login shell. This could, for e.g., be sourced from ~/.bash_logout

Setting up for an another user on the same machine

This is if you want to share your existing customizations in the first user without much script copying. This will require that the user has read access to the primary user's .startup.

Extract contents to the user's home directory. Edit ~/.startup/conf/startup-home to contain the home directory of the primary user. Other configuration could be done on an user basis in this directory, details follow.

Remember that everything to be written is written to the user's home directory. All reading of scripts is done from the primary user's home directory (excluding the configuration information).