Trying on a rawhide installation 'man gnome-wm', which is supplied by gnome-session-2.24.1-3.fc10, you can read the following:
NAME gnome-wm - Launches the user selected window manager for the GNOME session
The catch is none what is described down this page seems to be true.
If you will look at /usr/bin/gnome-wm script then you can find in it the following:
# NOTE: DON'T USE THIS. Please have your window manager install # a desktop file and change the gconf key # /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager
That gconf key used to be /apps/gnome-session/rh/window_manager and that worked, even if 'man gnome-wm' was telling fairy tales. With /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager the best I could achieve was a session with no window manager at all. I tried some interpretations of an "install a desktop file" remark but this got me nowhere.
There are hacks to get another window manager running. For example, you can put early enough in $PATH a link, named 'metacity', to a desired window manager binaries. In case some option mapping would be required then this link should be replaced by an appropriate shell script but you get the drift. So you can have any windown manager you want as long as it is _called_ "metacity".
Is this un-documented somewhere and I missed it or this is a straight bugzilla material? A Google search brought me only numerous tales of woe from people attempting switch window managers for Gnome and miserably failing.
Michal
p.s. For "again" part check https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=449048
Michal, I ran into the same thing trying to replace metacity with e16. The problem is that gnome expects to find a desktop file in /usr/share/applications matching the value in desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager.. in your case it's looking for /usr/share/applications/wmaker.desktop.. and if that desktop file isn't there, it won't start your window manager, logging "WARNING: Unable to find provider 'wmaker' of required component 'windowmanager'" to ~/.xsessions-error.
Adding a wmaker.desktop file to /usr/share/applications should fix this.. if windowmaker has one in /usr/share/xsessions you can copy it over and change its "Type=Xsession" line to "Type=Application", otherwise you can copy and adapt the metacity.desktop that's already there.
On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 09:59:58AM +0100, hdfssk wrote:
Michal, I ran into the same thing trying to replace metacity with e16. The problem is that gnome expects to find a desktop file in /usr/share/applications matching the value in desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager.. in your case it's looking for /usr/share/applications/wmaker.desktop..
That was somebody else who tried windowmaker. I never used that particular manager but these are details.
and if that desktop file isn't there, it won't start your window manager, logging "WARNING: Unable to find provider 'wmaker' of required component 'windowmanager'" to ~/.xsessions-error.
That I figured out from what may pass for a "documentation", i.e. a comment in /usr/bin/gnome-wm which says:
# NOTE: DON'T USE THIS. Please have your window manager install # a desktop file and change the gconf key # /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager
The problem was that at a time of my attempts this still did not work. Of course what "a desktop file" need to contain is left to your divinations.
Adding a wmaker.desktop file to /usr/share/applications should fix this..
After your posting I tried again and this time this indeed helped. Maybe my sawfish.desktop file, with which I was exerimenting, was missing something although I modified it from a copy of an existing metacity.desktop. Or maybe I was trying "too early"?
This detail that in gconf you also have /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/default and /apps/gnome-session/rh/window_manager surely does not help. Especially when you are using GUI it is very easy to mix things up. Note differences between "window_manager" and "windowmanager".
Thanks, Michal
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Michal Jaegermann -
potat0