[lug] detecting which window manager?

[Andrew F. Gilmore]

On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 16:12 -0600, D. Stimits wrote:
> I'm using fedora, but that should be irrelevant to this question. I'm 
> wondering is there any way to detect which window manager is being used?
> 
> This should be easy, but I'm stumped, ps aux shows nothing relevant. I'm 
> set to use kdm for login...apparently the window manager is not set as 
> an argument to kdm or X servers. Window managers themselves appear to 
> not be a process, at least not when launched under kdm...this would make 
> sense though, as kdm runs at all times, and the window manager to run is 
> not known till the user starts a session. I was digging around in 
> /etc/X11/, could not find anything that would definitively tell me. In 
> /etc/sysconfig/desktop, the only relevant entries are for DESKTOP="KDE" 
> and DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE"...but I'm under the impression that KDE is 
> *not* a window manager, just a login manager. Am I wrong? Is KDE also a 
> window manager? Or am I running something else like sawfish or icewm?

This is something that is also challenging for the SELinux project,
because all KDE applications appear to run as 'kdeinit'. If you're
running GNOME, the window manager is a separate process, i.e. metacity,
sawfish, whatever. Not sure about XFCE and icewm, but I would bet that
they also are their own processes.

Andrew
-- 
Andrew F. Gilmore <agilmore at wirelessbeehive.com>