barti, I may have mislead you -- gnome-session and its dependencies are no longer sufficient as the packages needed for a minimum Gnome installation. I have not installed Gnome since OpenBSD 5.0, and this change is effective with 5.1.
There are now two meta-packages for installing Gnome:
- "gnome" -- a standard Gnome installation
- "gnome-extras" -- accessibility, development, personal information management and office tools.
Since you want
Gnome, please continue to get that working. I recommend avoiding installing any other window manager --
daemonfowl is trying to be helpful, but in this case I believe he is needlessly sending you down paths you need not follow. He, like you, is a new user -- he just has some months head start on you.
You started with fvwm already working, so you need not worry about X -configure or XDM or GDM. Your intent, at this point, is to get Gnome working. Please, stick to that. ONE THING AT A TIME. You should try to reach your objectives without diversions.
The .xsession file is used by the Window Managers (XDM, GDM, KDM...) and the .xinitrc file is used by startx and xinit. We have been suggesting you log on to a console and use startx so that you can more easily collect logs and other information if and when there were problems. Once you have your configuration working, you may use a Window Manager with .xsession if you prefer to do so.