switching window managers with Gnome 2.24.3 (and its session bug)

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On Mon, 2009-01-19 at 15:26 -0800, George Hartzell wrote:
> I'm fond of sawfish.  I upgraded to 2.24.3 over the weekend and now
> can't seem to convince it to let me switch from metacity to sawfish.
> 
> I run my X session using startx, which exec's a gnome-session.
> 
> I've used the technique described in item 9 of the FAQ (kill metacity,
> start sawfish, use gnome-session to save things) to no avail.
> 
> I'm assuming that it not working is related to the problem with
> session management in Gnome 2.24 (see item 4 in the faq224.html).
> 
> As described here:
> 
>   http://damumbl.byteholder.de/blog/?p=44

Yes this is the problem.

> 
> I've tried changing the gconf key:
> 
>   /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/current
> 
> to sawfish but I end up without a window manager and a message on my
> console from gnome-session that says:
> 
>   gnome-session[80010]: WARNING: Unable to find provider 'sawfish' of
>   required component 'windowmanager'.
> 
> After messing around a bit I finally got it to work by copying 
> 
>   /usr/local/share/gnome/wm-properties/Sawfish.desktop
> 
> to
> 
>   ~/.local/share/applications/sawfish.desktop
> 
> and there was much joy.
> 
> Simple renaming Sawfish.desktop to sawfish.desktop in the original
> directory didn't seem to have any effect.

The two are very different.  You could have copied it
to /usr/local/share/applications, though for the same effect.

Hopefully this session management stuff will be sorted out in GNOME
2.26.

Joe

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