Other Help Topics :: Boot into an empty X and start one single Program

Your first line should be fine

Also, how did you "restart" the window manager? Afaik, if you use the wm's restart, only itself will be restarted.
Since .xinitrc is not part of the wm, you should kill x, then run startx again.

Oops I kept using the window managers restart function...

Without that it works fine!! Thanks a lot for your help and your patience :-)

original here.