A.M.Gimblett:
I'm running xmonad under FreeBSD 6.1 and Ubuntu Fiesty, both using gdm, from ~/.xsession. I'm not using any Ubuntu magic to add a new display manager menu item - I hacked this mechanism together back when FreeBSD was all I used (ie until about a month ago).
The relevant part of ~/.xsession looks something like:
--
dzstatus &
while true ; do PICK=$(gmessage -buttons _Xmonad,_Ice,"GTK_STOCK_QUIT" -default _Xmonad -center -print "Window Manager?") case $PICK in _Xmonad) /usr/local/bin/xmonad > /dev/null 2>&1 ;; _Ice) /usr/bin/icewm ;; GTK_STOCK_QUIT) exit ;; esac done
--
dzstatus is a shell script which just runs a (python) status-building script and pipes it to a dzen2. It's external to .xsession so I can easily kill/restart my status bar when tweaking.
I'm using this while/gmessage mechanism for a couple of reasons. First, it's sometimes nice to have a choice of window manager, though I don't use anything other than xmonad these days of course.
Second, and mainly, it allows me to exit xmonad without ending the X session, so I can restart xmonad after a rebuild. The mod-q restart mechanism doesn't work for me because if I try to install a new xmonad while the old one is running, I get:
[gimbo@orb xmonad] sudo runghc Setup install Installing: /usr/local/lib/xmonad-0.2/ghc-6.6 & /usr/local/bin xmonad-0.2... *** Exception: /usr/local/bin/xmonad: copyFile: resource busy (Text file busy)
No-one else seems to mention this? At first I thought it was a FreeBSD-ism, but I get the same under Ubuntu. Any thoughts?
Ah ha, rm -f `which xmonad` : http://xmonad.org/faq.html#config Cabal bug (imo). We should complain to the cabal guys.
(Related: I have to manually chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/xmonad after every install, which is annoying.)
I think this was fixed in the most recent cabal. I certainly don't see it with: $ ghc-pkg list Cabal /home/dons/lib/ghc-6.6/package.conf: Cabal-1.1.7 Cheers, Don