Re: WM choice

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

David Shochat <shochat acm org> writes:
> I have been trying to figure out the proper way to configure WM
> preference in RH8.0 Gnome. My most recent attempt was: gconftool-2
> --set --type string
> /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/default /usr/bin/sawfish
> 
> If I check "save current setup" when logging out, this seems to
> stick (gconftool-2 -R shows sawfish after logging back in). However,
> it is still metacity that is running. I also tried setting
> window_manager/current as well as default. What am I doing wrong? I
> checked bugzilla and I don't see anything open for this.

You change WM the same way you change any other default app in the
session - kill the current one, start a new one, save the session.
Or edit ~/.gnome2/session directly.

You can try "killall metacity; sawfish" followed by
"gnome-session-save" though metacity will respawn, sometimes before
sawfish starts; so you may have to try a couple times. Or another way
is to open "gnome-session-properties" and remove metacity from the
session that way, maybe after doing "sleep 20 && sawfish" in a
terminal.

It's cleaner if the WM you want to switch to supports "-replace" or
"--replace", then you can do something like:

 fvwm2 -replace
 gnome-session-save

without all the killall business. That's really the intended way for
it to work.

Havoc