On Mon, Aug 30 2010, Jim Cheetham wrote:

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Sergey Manucharian wrote:

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I'm trying to get a handle on the different "levels" that xmonad can run at: either within gnome, or instead of gnome... is that right?

Not quite; XMonad manages windows, Gnome manages "desktop sessions" and uses something else to manage windows -- in Ubuntu that's metacity.

It's quite possible to have Gnome running with XMonad as the window manager -- if you do this you can have the standard gnome-panel with menus, application icons and status applets. Mind you, there is a little confusion in idiom between a window manager that primarily uses the keyboard with a panel that primarily demands the mouse ...

The following command will change the window manager that Gnome uses :- $ gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager xmonad --type string

(set it to gnome-wm to get the old metacity back)

Thanks for all the recommendations and pointers! I think this is the solution I'll start with, at least until I'm comfortable enough with xmonad configuration to play with standalone status bars. Off to give it a shot… Eric

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 8/30/10 04:21 , Magnus Therning wrote:

Once you have that up and running though, you might run into another issue. One that I haven't found any solution to yet. Some applications seem to minimise just fine under other WMs, but refuse to do so under xmonad. The only application I frequently use suffering from this is empathy. If you run into the same issue, and manage to solve it, then please pass on the information :-)

At a guess, it posts _NET_WM_STATE to the root window instead of minimizing. I'm working on it :) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx8GCIACgkQIn7hlCsL25UtawCghTFz+N+MchwYsd+eu8cLOE7r M0QAn1XZSRDzWcM7r98xPJwCoZATZdul =Bzt4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 8/30/10 21:41 , Justin Bogner wrote:

Brandon S Allbery KF8NH writes:

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At a guess, it posts _NET_WM_STATE to the root window instead of minimizing. I'm working on it :)

WM_CHANGE_STATE, actually...

Hm. http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/1.3/ar01s05.html#id2522991 says "A Client wishing to change the state of a window MUST send a _NET_WM_STATE client message to the root window (see below)." Are there multiple ways of doing this now? (I noticed a few other things seem to have changed, but their documentation at least says so.) - -- brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.10 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkx8YSYACgkQIn7hlCsL25XwkACdH+xDPmNqDpaSfYpBNgL0pe+N Xg8AmwZFnwJ9lSBg9zBLhRUkSrwZWKEf =RFnV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Magnus Therning writes:

Once you have that up and running though, you might run into another issue. One that I haven't found any solution to yet. Some applications seem to minimise just fine under other WMs, but refuse to do so under xmonad. The only application I frequently use suffering from this is empathy. If you run into the same issue, and manage to solve it, then please pass on the information :-)

XMonad.Hooks.Minimize can handle how empathy minimizes. The problem is that empathy uses hints to minimize, rather than just hiding its own window.