[lug] Gnome Window Manager

[J. Wayde Allen]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Hugh Brown wrote:

> Do you have all of the gnome packages installed?

I had installed basically anything that I could find relating to gnome,
and my Debian package manager indicated that all dependencies had been
satisfied.

> Is there anything in ~/.xsession, or if you start x from a console can
> you go back to the console and find a message (sometimes the term on
> Ctrl-Alt-F10 has error messages).  Do yo have all of the graphic file
> format libraries installed?
> 
> It may also be a function of the theme you have chosen for gnome.

I think the problem had to do with the configuration files for the Window
Managers.  I had originally been running IceWm which had been installed as
the default, then switched to Enlightenment.  Up to then everything was
going well.  I then attempted to show one of my coworkers how really cool
the Debian package manager is.  That little exercise resulted in the
removal of 75 packages from my system <oops>.  After trying to recover
these files I had the behavior mentioned.  Simply forcing the system to
switch the window managers was enough to get the system to re-configure
itself and the problem went away.

In the meantime, I had an interesting new problem on another machine.  I
installed fvwm95 on that machine along with gnome.  I'm pretty certain
that fvwm95 is not gnome aware, but didn't know that you could get both
running at the same time.  That meant that I had the gnome control panel
pasted across the bottom of the screen with the fvwm95 task bar underneath
displaying lots of iconized programs.  Switching to Enlightenment fixed
that.  One of these days I guess I need to sit down and understand exactly
what this gnome thing really does.

- Wayde
  (wallen at its.bldrdoc.gov)