Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 16:58, Jacek Generowicz wrote:

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- Gnome seems to do a fairly decent job of automatically detecting and managing wireless networks. How would I go about this without Gnome's assistance? Is there something that can be plugged into XMonad which will show me available networks, and allow me to

nm-applet will work with something like trayer instead of the GNOME panel,

Sounds good. Trayer is near the top of my 'check this out' list.

although you may need to run xmonad under ck-start-session.

Hmm, ck-start-session is news to me, and inital searches didn't make me all that much wiser.

wicd is another possibility

That looks promising.

...

- What's the quickest way of accessing system settings. I've been trying to run without the unity panel and launcher, but I've had to respawn them just to get access to system setting.

It should be possible to run gnome-control-center

Ah, cool, that's what I was looking for. It certainly solves the immediate problem.

or systemsettings (the KDE version, which you might need to install) without having to start either Gnome or KDE. The latter might work better, as KDE's not as much into the "let's start the whole desktop first!" thing.

Good to know. Some great leads there. Many thanks.

At Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:15:52 -0500, Isaac Dupree wrote:

On 01/14/2012 06:27 PM, Jacek Generowicz wrote:

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Brandon Allbery wrote:

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although you may need to run xmonad under ck-start-session.

Hmm, ck-start-session is news to me, and inital searches didn't make me all that much wiser.

Probably Brandon meant ck-launch-session... you should be able to search that!

Sorry, I spotted his mistake and found ck-launch-session, but then copied his incorrect name in my reply. What I meant was that glancing over my initial searches (whilst also checking out all sorts of other stuff that he mentioned), this one left still mostly clueless as to what it is about. Particularly surprising was that ck-launch-session --help runs, but with no output whatsoever. No man entry, nothing resembling documentation on the first few Google searches. Never mind, the other stuff is plenty to keep me busy for a while.

On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 19:32, Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 18:27, Jacek Generowicz wrote:

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Brandon Allbery wrote:

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On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 16:58, Jacek Generowicz < jacek.generowicz@cern.ch>wrote: although you may need to run xmonad under ck-start-session.

Hmm, ck-start-session is news to me, and inital searches didn't make me all that much wiser.

It's part of ConsoleKit, which NetworkManager / nm-applet uses to authenticate the console user as being permitted to control wifi.

...and to answer the question I *should* have answered: in ~/.xsession, replace "exec xmonad" with "exec ck-launch-session xmonad". -- brandon s allbery allbery.b@gmail.com wandering unix systems administrator (available) (412) 475-9364 vm/sms

I am joining late, but in case it helps: On Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:33:19 +0100,Jacek Generowicz wrote:

Brandon Allbery wrote:

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nm-applet will work with something like trayer instead of the GNOME panel,

Any hints on how to progress with this?

When I try

trayer & nm-applet

I get

** Message: applet now removed from the notification area ** (nm-applet:2096): DEBUG: old state indicates that this was not a disconnect 0

...

although you may need to run xmonad under ck-start-session.

As I'm doing only inital trials at the moment, I don't want to exit my session and lose my bazillion windows. Could not running it through ck-launch-session be the cause of the above? From what you said elsewhere ...

I have nm-applet and trayer working fine. I launch trayer and nm-applet from .xinitrc, something like trayer --and-a-bunch-of-options nm-applet --sm-disable > /dev/null 2> /dev/null & xmonad I can kill and relaunch nm-applet as many times as I want without trouble (which I often do when I change display configuration options via xrandr, say for class presentations, etc).

...

It's part of ConsoleKit, which NetworkManager / nm-applet uses to authenticate the console user as being permitted to control wifi.

I had some trouble with that too. I need to use kdm or gdm as display manager (I used to use wdm, but I could never get the wdm + ck-launch-session combination to work correctly, a problem that has been reported before). Using kdm/gdm, however, these issues can be dealt with; see these threads in the NetworkManager list: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2011-November/msg00083.ht... http://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2011-November/msg00020.ht... Hope this helps, R.

... it seems that it shouldn't be a problem, because I'm running in a session in which nm-applet was, earlier, happily running on unity-2d-panel, so I'm guessing that the authentication plumbing is in place. Though I did have to kill that panel to stop trayer from complaining with

another systray already running

Is it possible to restart XMonad with ck-launch-session without losing my current window configuration?

Thanks.

_______________________________________________ xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/xmonad -- Ramon Diaz-Uriarte Department of Biochemistry, Lab B-25. Facultad de Medicina (UAM) Arzobispo Morcillo, 4 28029 Madrid Spain

Phone: +34-91-497-2412 Email: rdiaz02@gmail.com ramon.diaz@iib.uam.es http://ligarto.org/rdiaz

On Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:32:00 +0100,Jacek Generowicz wrote:

Ramon Diaz-Uriarte wrote:

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I am joining late, but in case it helps:

I need all the help I can get :-)

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I have nm-applet and trayer working fine. I launch trayer and nm-applet from .xinitrc,

Now here is something where I'm completely lost: How do I choose between .xinitrc, .xsession, startx, xinit, X, gdm, lightdm etc. etc?

These are fragmentary notes (from fragmentary knowledge) I've always used .xinitrc, though I think some display managers want to see an .xinitrc; in some places I've read the advice to create a symbolic link (i.e., ln -s .xsession .xinitrc). But I could be missing some details. As for gdm and kdm, they will make use of .xinitrc if one exists. You said you are using ubuntu, so your start scripts will, by default, launch one of kdm/gdm/wdm/whatever (in Debian, when you do something like dpkg-reconfigure gdm, you are asked what display manager you want).

(And where in all this does/should .Xmodmap get read? I'm testing ideas by starting a second X server, and something somewhere is reading my .Xmodmap when I launch a session normally, but not manually.)

If I remember correctly, the following will work if you add it to your .xsession/.xinitrc xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

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[...] I change display configuration options via xrandr [...]

Note to self: Check out Xrandr.

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I need to use kdm or gdm as display manager

For technical reasons?

Just because I could not get wdm to get all the Policy Kit stuff to run. When using wdm, having the last line of .xsession be ck-launch-session xmonad or exec ck-launch-session xmonad or exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session xmonad or exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch --exit-with-session xmonad and a few other incantations never seemed to really work; so I could not get the ck-list-sessions to report that I was really locally logged (and nm-applet did not like that ;-).

...

I could never get the wdm + ck-launch-session combination to work correctly

Do I understand correctly that ck-launch-session is something that I will only need if I use nm-applet? If I go with wicd, ck-launch session won't be necessary?

If I remember correctly, wicd did not need ck-launch-session.

Does anyone have any comments on nm-applet vs. wicd?

I really tried to use wicd (I do not like to depend on a huge list of gnome stuff just to use my wifi, and I wanted to go back to wdm). However, I found configuration of wicd harder (specially with networks that combine WPA enterprise, certificates, etc), but this might just be my own incompetence. Also, I found nm-applet less intrusive (e.g., showing the available networks is just a small pop-up, and does not take a whole window). Best, R. -- Ramon Diaz-Uriarte Department of Biochemistry, Lab B-25. Facultad de Medicina (UAM) Arzobispo Morcillo, 4 28029 Madrid Spain Phone: +34-91-497-2412 Email: rdiaz02@gmail.com ramon.diaz@iib.uam.es http://ligarto.org/rdiaz

Brandon, Thank you for your input, which is consistently concise, relevant and useful. Though it *is* rather cruel of you to bombard me with lots of useful information just before I *should* be retiring for the night :-) Brandon Allbery wrote:

Display managers use ~/.xsession

Command line uses startx, which is a wrapper for xinit, which uses ~/.xinitrc

That's sort of the impression I had, but it's good to have it confirmed. Should I worry about the distinction between startx and xinit? Given that my Oneiric seems to be running LightDM, I'm trying to stick with that for now. I don't want to close my session (which contains too much useful state (Tangential queston: Any hints on good session-saving/restoring tools for XMonad?)), so I'm trying to start a second LightDM on a second X server, to test out trial configurations. ps reports that LightDM was started thus: /usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch so I try sudo /usr/bin/X :1 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:1 -nolisten tcp vt8 -novtswitch This gives me completely black screens. Any ideas how to run a second LightDM on a second X server? Orthogonal question: I seem to have added an XMonad session definition for LightDM by creating files such as /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/xmonad.session and /usr/share/xsessions/xmonad-unity-session.desktop I did this by copying some examples, and even managed to customize them a bit my stumbling around in the dark. Any hints where to find documentation on these files? Should I write such a file to get LightDM to start a non-Gnome XMonad session ? They don't seem to be LightDM-specific, so would they work with other Display managers? Thanks very much for all your help.

Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 18:08, Jacek Generowicz wrote:

...

sudo /usr/bin/X :1 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:1 -nolisten tcp vt8 -novtswitch

That's going to start an X server running nothing and with no way for anything else to connect to it; not very useful.

That would explain the black screens then :-) But how come something equivalent seems to be running on :0 and doing something useful?

Display managers are usually designed to support multiple sessions; that is, instead of running a separate display manager for each display, you have a single display manager which manages multiple displays.

So I should be able to get the already-running instance of LightDM to open a new session for me? Presumably, that's exactly what 'switch user' does. Only I don't want to switch user, I want to run another session for the same one.

It also appears that LightDM documentation is nonexistent. https://answers.launchpad.net/lightdm/+question/179211 is about how to manage multiple displays; while it gives a recipe, it also notes that the only way to work this stuff out currently is to read the source code. :/

From the above URL: Overall, any unknown keyword or unexpected configuration in the conffile is silently ignored Hmmm. That's encouraging. Sigh. By 'multiple seats' does he mean that LightDM will run a login screen on :0 :1 :2 etc.? So I could have my working session on :0 and keep starting new ones to experiment on :1? But will the display mananager have to be restarted to pick up changes in desktop files?

...

Any hints where to find documentation on these files?

http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-lates...

The session files are the same format, and are supposed to be / work the same whether used from gdm, kdm, lightdm, etc.

Another coin drops, as stray bits of information that have (weakly) penetrated my head over the last week, collect into a slightly more meaningful whole. Much appreciated.

On 17 January 2012 11:32, Brandon Allbery wrote:

Yeh.  Personally I'd be removing it and installing gdm or kdm at that point.  :/

LXDM isn't flash but seems to work rather well, with minimal deps. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com

On 17 January 2012 11:57, Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 19:43, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

...

On 17 January 2012 11:32, Brandon Allbery wrote:

...

Yeh.  Personally I'd be removing it and installing gdm or kdm at that point.  :/

LXDM isn't flash but seems to work rather well, with minimal deps.

I admit to not having looked recently, but KDM used to be little more than xdm with prettier widgets, and very lightweight.

Lot's of qt deps nowadays, kdelibs, libkworkspace, etc. And GDM seems to require almost all of Gnome installed nowadays (which is why I uninstalled it and went with lxdm) -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com

[Lots of people wrote lots of suggestions about Display Managers and Desktop Environments] OK, I'm getting a bit overwhelmed by the plethora of DMs and DEs. Just trying to get the basic infromation together in one place (maybe some decent version of this should go up on the Haskell Wiki): (Presumably, some of these DEs naturally go with some of these DMs) * Display Managers ** LightDM + Default in Oneiric + Config Errors silenly ignored + No documentation at all + Light ** LDM ** LXDM ** KDM ** GDM Depends heavily on Gnome * Desktop Envinorments ** No DE at all Is that possible? Can you just get by with + XMonad + xmobar / dzen2 / taffybar .. + wicd / nm-applet + ck-launch-session + some power management utility + etc. (e.g. Blueman) ** LXDE + Light ** XFCE + Light, but not as light as XFCE ** Gnome 3 + Heavy ** Unity + Even heavier * Network Managers ** nm-applet + From Gnome, but works independently of Gnome + Will need to start XMonad with ck-launch-session ** wicd + Light + VPN support not great

On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:49:37 +0000 (UTC),Ben Boeckel wrote:

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 11:15:20 GMT, Jacek Generowicz wrote:

...

** No DE at all Is that possible? Can you just get by with

+ XMonad + xmobar / dzen2 / taffybar .. + wicd / nm-applet + ck-launch-session + some power management utility + etc. (e.g. Blueman)

I use xmonad, xmobar, ck-launch-session (pulseaudio works much better in a CK session), no power management, no bluetooth, and Red Hat ifcfg scripts and wpa_supplicant for network.

Something similar here: xmonad, xmobar, nm-applet. No nm-power-management-whatever (I pipe output of acpi to xmobar, and have sleepd and similar running as daemons), no bluetooth. R.

--Ben

_______________________________________________ xmonad mailing list xmonad@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/xmonad -- Ramon Diaz-Uriarte Department of Biochemistry, Lab B-25. Facultad de Medicina (UAM) Arzobispo Morcillo, 4 28029 Madrid Spain

Phone: +34-91-497-2412 Email: rdiaz02@gmail.com ramon.diaz@iib.uam.es http://ligarto.org/rdiaz

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 06:13, Jacek Generowicz wrote:

Personally, I can't work with the "everything else has to be restarted every time you want to try something" workflow. (I won't really be happy until I can do kernel upgrades without having to log out (How's the Hurd getting on?) :-)

ksplice, anyone?

...

The other alternative is xinit/startx, which launches a server and then feeds a connection to that server to a script which attaches things to it to make a session.

Any pointers on how to get this going?

Log in on the text console (ctrl-alt-f1 from the graphical login); "startx -- :1". Have your ~/.xinitrc set up to run xmonad (as previously mentioned, you can simply link it to an existing ~/.xsession). -- brandon s allbery allbery.b@gmail.com wandering unix systems administrator (available) (412) 475-9364 vm/sms

Magnus Therning wrote:

Another option that you might find worth exploring is using one of the lighter desktop environments, such as XFCE or LXDE. I think both of them would allow you to move away from Gnome/Unity without having to invest so heavily in finding replacements for all the parts of Gnome/Unity that "make things just work".

Any thoughts choosing between XFCE and LXDE, if I should try going down this route?

Ivan, Thanks for the summary. Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

If you want very minimal DE stuff, [...] I've ended up using xfce's power manager and wicd for networking.

Yes, I'd like to try having something minimal around XMonad. Networking and power management are the obvious and fundamental things to be done outside XMonad. Anything else that might fall into this category, that I might be overlooking?

Xfce is more of a full-fledged DE, but unless it has changed recently there's no official way of having a custom WM (other than using session support to remember not to use xfce4wm and to launch xmonad).

Is that a problem? Sounds like what you would have to do for pretty much any session manager.

On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 18:59, Jacek Generowicz wrote:

Magnus Therning wrote:

...

Another option that you might find worth exploring is using one of the lighter desktop environments, such as XFCE or LXDE.  I think both of them would allow you to move away from Gnome/Unity without having to invest so heavily in finding replacements for all the parts of Gnome/Unity that "make things just work".

Any thoughts choosing between XFCE and LXDE, if I should try going down this route?

I recently threw out Gnome3 in favour of Xmonad+LXDE (with lxdm). I had a brief look at XFCE first, but it looked a bit more complicated to get XFCE to use Xmonad so I decided to try LXDE first and haven't found any reason to bother with XFCE yet :) I wrote the page on setting up Xmonad in LXDE and it's rather short and sweet. Personally I haven't found anything in LXDE that's limiting *me* in my computer usage. What I've noticed so far is: • wicd doesn't have good support for VPN yet (you can use post-connect scripts, but that's very rudimentary compared to NM) • the randr application in LXDE (lxrandr) is not nearly as capable as the one in Gnome3 /M -- Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 email: magnus@therning.org   jabber: magnus@therning.org twitter: magthe               http://therning.org/magnus