[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Openbox as Gnomes window manager? :-s



On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 20:14:40 +0100
Tom <tom@abwaerts.be> wrote:

> Now, I wanted to add a user to the system. When I logged her in,
> Applications --> Desktop Preferences --> Theme didn't show a "window
> border" tab, as it does with my login. That felt odd. Changes made
> with metacity-setup didn't change anything, which made more sense when
> Openbox appeared to be the window manager of the new user.
> 
> Using gconf-editor, I found that the default WM indeed was set to
> /usr/bin/openbox. I changed it to /usr/bin/metacity, logged out and
> back in, but nothing had changed. As root, I did "update-alternatives
> --config x-window-manager", and chose Metacity, but once again, that
> didn't solve the problem.
> 
> What's wrong? Is this a bug? Or what am I overlooking? Is there a way
> have the default (Metacity) back?

Probably you changed the default, but openbox is still in that user's
gnome-session and thus overrides it. Window-manager handling in GNOME is
really pretty fugly, mainly because the various WM's interact with
gnome-session in different ways.

This one, however, *should* be pretty easy. Log in as that user and do:

metacity --replace

That should replace openbox with metacity in the session. Make sure you
save changes to the session when you log out, if that isn't done
automatically. 

I think that should work but if it doesn't, you should be able to kill
the openbox process and start up a metacity process from an xterm. It's
just that the momentary loss of a WM can make input difficult if you
don't do it correctly.

And FWIW, Openbox 3 blows Metacity out of the water as a GNOME WM. You
may want to check it out. IMHO, of course...

-- 
Todd Pytel

----------------------------------------
Signature attached
PGP Key ID 77B1C00C

Attachment: pgpdP819VCBEK.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Reply to: