Kai Grossjohann wrote:
On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 02:59:18PM -0400, Geoffrey Alan Washburn wrote:
I have found that including "gnome-settings-daemon" and "gnome-power-manager" in ~/.xinitrc will allow me to retain unobtrusive notifications concerning m laptop's battery. I think starting "update-notifier" will also present you with notifications concerning updates, but I have not been able to test this yet.
This is interesting. Perhaps I could log in via Gnome and take a snapshot of all processes, then compare with the xmonad login.
I had been thinking of the opposite route: Keep the normal Gnome session but just replace the window manager. (Gnome has a setting that says which WM to run.) I'm not sure how that will pan out.
How has it panned out? If it doesn't work, here's my experience doing similar things. I'm running Debian, so details below might be similar for Ubuntu. When I'm running xmonad or dwm, I typically launch the stuff that 'gnome-session' does from my .xsession file, and I choose "Launch Xclient script" in gdm. That seems to be the easiest way. Until now, I've stuck to 'gnome-settings-daemon' (for fonts and desktop background) and 'gnome-volume-manager' (to enable automounting USB drives), and some other things preceding xmonad in my .xsession file. Thanks to Geoffrey for pointing out 'gnome-power-manager', I may be adding that to my .xsession... :) For kicks I tried looking around now to discover just what is actually launched in a normal gnome session. It's a bit labyrinthine, but the man pages are adequate and I've made some progress. Maybe you can start with this and come up with the definitive answer, which I am far too lazy to discover: Starting with 'man gdm', we're led to '/etc/gdm/gdm.conf', from there to '/usr/share/gdm/defaults.conf', which states where session files live. One of those session files, '/usr/share/xsessions/gnome.desktop', shows that for "Gnome", gdm runs 'gnome-session'. That program manages the various others. I think gdm actually does some other work including launching ssh-agent as a parent process, you'll have to go spelunking through /etc/X11/Xsession* to figure that out. (I did once before and I've forgotten it now.) Onward, 'man gnome-session' and 'man default.session' point to '/usr/share/gnome/default.session', which contains on my system references to 'gnome-wm', 'gnome-panel', 'nautilus', and others. I expect that gnome-panel launches your network status app itself. I don't much like gnome-panel, so I have little experience making it work with xmonad. Trying it now, it starts tiled, not floating, and does not repaint itself properly. I had to adjust its "height" in its configuration tabs to make it do so. Just to obtain a tray utility, I think I'd go for the 'trayer' app previously mentioned by Alec, and launch applets from a script. Nautilus manages desktop icons. I don't like desktop icons, but I do like the nautilus file manager, so I use gconf-editor to uncheck /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop, and I don't launch it from my .xsession. 'gnome-wm' is supposed to obey the environment variable WINDOW_MANAGER, but apparently it does not work for Alex? I suspect that his 'export' statement is not occurring in a place where gnome-wm will be able to spot it, but I haven't tried it myself, nor have I tried to use gnome's control center to configure a different wm. 'gnome-settings-daemon' also gets launched by gnome-session, though apparently that's hard-coded within the executable and not mentioned in the man page. I don't know yet where gnome-volume-manager or gnome-power-manager are first launched. That's as far as I got. I'd be delighted to know if you discover the optimal way to accomplish this. Mike