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Changing the Gnome Window manager


iphitus
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THis is part of my upcoming Themeing and Desktop Environment HOW-TO.

 

THe HOW-TO is shamelessly biased towards GNOME, Fluxbox and GTK. I used GNOME 2.4 during the writing of this, but it should work in previos versions. Any comments are greatly appreciated.

 

Changing the GNOME WM

 

There are two ways of changing the gnome WM. If the first one fails as it does with Fluxbox, the second will work.

 

Method A

 

1) Start gconf-editor, you can start this at the command line, if you dont have it, see below.

 

2) Browse to /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager

 

3) Change the key 'default' so it's value is the path to your new window manager. If you are unsure of this at a command line type 'whereis nameofwm' replacing nameofwm with the command used to start the WM.

 

Method B

 

Should that not work, we have to workaround GNOMEs refusal to use our preferred WM.

 

1) Go to: GNOME Menu > Applications > Desktop Preferences > Advanced > Sessions

 

2) Once sessions is open, go the the 'Startup Programs' tab, then click Add

 

3) In the dialog that appears set the 'Order' to 1 and the startup command to the command used to start your WM.

 

How this works?

By setting the order to 1 GNOME will start this before anything else and when it comes to starting the default WM, it will fail, simply because there is already one running. This slows down startup a bit but if you like your WM, you wont mind.

 

TIP: Blackbox, Fluxbox and other *boxes.

In these boxes, when the GNOME desktop starts, the desktop area provided by Nautiulus will be given a window border. This really ruins the look, it's terrible. Also the panels will not always be positioned quite right, so that needs to be fixed. The good news is that in Fluxbox, these can be fixed easily, however if you use Blackbox or one of the other *boxes, bad luck. The following requires a fluxbox version of 0.9.2 or better. I reccomend you get a development version of fluxbox, at time of writing im using 0.9.6pre9 and it is perfectly stable, albeit one or two small bugs. There are RPMs at the bottom of this page.

 

Removing the desktop border:

Add these lines to your ~/.fluxbox/apps file.

[app] (desktop_window)

 [Deco]        {0xbffff110}

 [Sticky]      {yes}

 [Layer]       {12}

[end]

Deco tells it to remove the border, Sticky, to make it, erm Sticky and Layer to make sure it stays below all running X Clients.

 

For this to work, Fluxbox needs to be restarted. I am not sure if you can stick the lines in while FLuxbox is running.

 

Positioning the panel:

This can be a real problem if you have more than one panel, which I dont, I have the one that runs across the top of the screen.

 

You can add these lines to your ~/.fluxbox/apps file.

[app] (gnome-panel)

 [Position]    {0 0}

[end]

They are self explanatory, the two numbers are the X and Y co-ordinates of the top left corner of the GNOME panel. As with any modifications of the Fluxbox apps file, Fluxbox needs to be restarted.

 

GCONF-EDITOR

Debian: apt-get install gconf-editor

 

Mandrake rpm for GNOME 2.4: http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idp...k.i586.rpm.html

 

Red Hat: The mandrake RPM should be fine otherwise ask Google.

 

FLUXBOX DEVELOPMENT

Mandrake - Fluxbox 0.9.6pre9 Source RPM: http://rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/cooker/contr...9_1mdk.src.html

 

Mandrake - Fluxbox 0.9.6pre8 Compiled RPM: http://rpmfind.speakeasy.net/linux/RPM/coo...e8mdk.i586.html

 

Debian - I have a source but it isnt up to date, alien one of these or get the source tarball

 

Red Hat: The mandrake RPM should be fine otherwise ask Google.

 

Source - http://www.fluxbox.org/download/fluxbox-cu...rent-cvs.tar.gz

 

Thanks to Liquidzoo for osme of the RPM links. Arent the people on #musb so helpful!!

 

 

There ya go, if you have problems, let me know. If you use KDE I dont want to know you. Just Kidding. There is a KDE method coming soon and it is much easier.

 

James

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Oh, believe me the concept works. Because of diff versions of gnome-session the sleep command is the deciding factor. Sometimes it's needed, sometimes not, sometimes a different time variable other than 5....but it works. It's it's how I changed to metacity from sawfish in Debian, though I don't remember what I did with 'sleep'. Works in Mandrake and RedHat too. It works. It's how I tried flux, and wiamea in mandrakes gnome.

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and what are the advantages of using flux with gnome ?

 

bvc: There is no fluxbox beta. There is a development version which is very very stable.

 

paul: I like fluxbox, i didnt want to reconfigure all my keyboard shortuts and stuff for GNOME, using flux i keep em all. I like the way fluxbox themes work, they can look great, but lfuxbox is still very light on the system. It's easy to make flux themes, i have no idea for metacity or sawfish.

 

James

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