Re: Change GNOME window manager

alexd <troffasky@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Not sure if you mean, not wanting to run it manually, or at all. You
could put it in .xinitrc [or whatever Gnome's equivalent is] to have it
done automatically on login.

Well, I've tried 6 attempts at 'whatever Gnome's equivalent is' and none of
them work! Thanks for that suggestion - I tried putting that in either
..xsession or .xinitrc with no difference. That makes 8 attempts :(

I'd rather not have something that interferes with other desktop
environments but I'll put up with it for the moment. My home directory is a
network account, so I don't want to walk up to a machine with only KDE and
discover I can't login because my X login scripts assume GNOME. The
'killall' is therefore risky because what happens if the machine has GNOME
but doesn't have xfwm4: will I be left with no window manager at all?
Ideally I want some way to have GNOME fallback to metacity if the specified
WM isn't there.

The /apps/gnome-session/rh/window_manager key[1] /does/ do something, in
that if I change it I get a blank grey screen and no mouse pointer. But I
can't seem to change it to anything else other than metacity. The help says
it can be either 'metacity' or 'compiz': if I try to use compiz I run into
graphics card problems. I'm not root and I don't want to call sys-admin in
to fix them just to fiddle with my window manager.

My point was really that GNOME claims to be WM agnostic, and then makes it
highly opaque as to how to change it! There really must be an option inside
GNOME's config somewhere, if only I can find it!

Theo

[1] Who on earth thought that the Windows registry was a good feature to be
emulated? I suppose at least the GNOME version has documentation.
.

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