Re: [desktop] Thoughts on GTK+2 problems in Wmaker

[Matthew McGuire <gray@shadowglade.net>]

Hi list,

Thanks for the tips, and the cluebat. :) However there does not seem to 
be a solution. First let me outline my goal:

About a month or two ago I decided to try and assemble a selection of 
software suitable for Windomaker that would allow it to function as a 
moderately complete desktop environment. Most notably it is missing a 
file manager, and a number of other useful apps. I decided that Mozilla 
would be suitable for browsing and email, so GTK+ would be needed, If so 
then I decided to keep things small and veer away from Qt apps. Most of 
the remaining GTK+ apps are designed for use with GNOME and use GTK+2.0 
or GTK+1.2. I personally like a lot of the old GTK+1.2 apps but I veer 
away from them out of respect for the upcoming GTK+2.0 versions. 
This is probably a vain attempt at forward thinking. Currently most of 
(if not all) GTK+2.0 apps in Debian are part of GNOME 2 and present the 
problems mentioned in my earlier email to Marcelo.

So I would like to add GNOME or GTK+ apps to Windowmaker to make it 
moderately complete.

As it turns out, gnome-settings-daemon is the culprit/solution to my 
problem. Users in this setup will login to the machine using XDM, KDM, 
or WDM and will likely select wmaker as the window manager. The current 
version of GDM does not support this option. Once logged in the user 
shuld be able to run a GNOME or GTK+ app with the settings they have 
used before. Since gnome-session-manager was not used during login the 
gnome-settings-daemon is not run. Therefore the applications load with 
their system defaults including theme. This is annoying for people with 
specific visual needs. This can be resolved by running 
gnome-settings-daemon manually or with a login script of some kind. 
However this clobbers the desktop background to be a color gradient. Now 
any GNOME app that was run will switch to the correct theme and setup 
the user had previously defined. So aside from the background bit it 
sorta works. Oddly I have not found a place to fully disable the 
background change. The Background settings tool does not provide a 
"Don't use me" option.

Now some thoughts on Nautilus. Which for all its worth, has improved by 
leaps and bounds in the past year. Someone recomended setting Nautilus 
to not draw the desktop. This solves the background clobbering problem, 
but it completely removes the desktop icons. Although I am no fan of 
desktop icons, I readily accept that most people will expect them to be 
present. For comparison, good old gmc creates desktop icons without 
clobbering the desktop in some unsightly manner. I went to the trouble 
to research the gmc source to see how, but was quickly lost in the sheer 
size of it's source tarball. Although I think it creates a window for 
each icon, arranges them according to config, and somehow hides them 
from the window manager window list. It would be nice to see this work 
in Nautilus as well.

Unless anyone disagrees I think it is best for me to file bugs against 
some of the GNOME 2 stuff with the hope that it will be resolved. 

In the end GNOME 2 is a great Desktop and suite of Applications, 
and there are numerous improvements over GNOME 1.4. However GNOME 1.4 
apps ran without any problems in other window managers and in KDE. It 
would be very usefull for GNOME 2 apps to work equally well.

Big thanks for your patience. If you got this far, you deserve a cookie. 
:)

Sincerely,

Matthew McGuire