Re: GNOME Start Script

[Tom Tromey <tromey cygnus com>]

>> I'd like to propose a script that starts the "gnome environment"
>> upon starting X.

Marc> That would be great.  Tom Tromey's session manager actually has
Marc> defaults in it to start up a few programs (if you don't already
Marc> have session information saved).  I think it actually suffices
Marc> as a "GNOME start script".  Is that right Tom?

The session manager does act as you say.  My goal is that it should be
the only program you have to run from your .xinitrc (or whatever).

However, the session manager does not yet start a window manager.
Adding that is trivial, but I don't know how to decide which one to
start.  Note that this is only relevant to the default configuration,
so adding a way to configure this is overkill (since the user can
switch once and things ought to work correctly from then on).

One idea I had was to let the choice of default wm be a configure-time
option.  Then the package builder could pick the default most sensible
for the platform.  Does this sound acceptable?

Sadly, most (all?) window managers don't seem to be session-aware,
meaning that actually switching is likely not to work.  If you know
somebody who maintains a window manager, consider writing and asking
for session manager support.  The session manager uses the X Session
Management Protocol, so this wouldn't be tying the wm to Gnome in any
way -- it would just make it more useful with Gnome.

Tom