Re: Detecting GNOME

[Benjamin Kahn <xkahn ximian com>]

On Sat, 2005-07-23 at 21:22 +0200, Tomasz Melcer wrote:
> Hello!
> 
>   Is there a simple way to check if GNOME manages an X display? I have
> an app, which would integrate with GNOME; however I don't want to depend
> on GNOME libs and I don't want to load them if user doesn't have it
> already loaded.
>   The app is written in python. Actually I only want to run GNOME
> browser/mailer if user runs GNOME and predefined apps if he doesn't.
>   I thought of checking if gnome-session is run in the system, but this
> will fail in many cases. Probably the best way would be to try to find
> something related to GNOME through X protocol. However, I googled a bit
> and didn't found any answer.

On Novell Linux Desktop, we have a number of applications which try to
detect which desktop environment is running and perform the correct
action.  I have no idea how much customization went into the detection
scripts, but I know at least some did.  Here's what we look for:

	$DESKTOP_SESSION == gnome
	${WINDOWMANAGER##*/} == *gnome*
	$GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID == gnome

maybe this can help you?