On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 03:00:50PM +0100, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote: > On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 11:40:51AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > > > That said, the update-alternatives still seem to be the correct way > > of changing the wm. > > System wide, yes. But the key in the gconf database is a per-user > setting. > > > Sure, but gnome-wm is a gnome thingy which know nothing about how > > debian works. > > Well, that's the problem. After sending my previous mail I looked at > the gnome-wm script (yes, it's a script, I should have looked at it > sooner). It basically does this: > > if there's a WINDOW_MANAGER environment variable, it uses that. > > if not, it uses the x-window-manager alternative > > if that's foobared, then fall back to a number of funny choices
Yes, there was some discution about this some time back. > And _then_ write the result to the key I mentioned earlier. That means > you can change the key using gconf or whatever, and it will get > friendly overwritten by gnome-wm. > > > > That still doesn't help me with the other problem: gnome-session not > > > starting a window manager at all. I though gnome-session just ran > > > gnome-wm, but somehow I managed to convice it not to do that. > > > Did you try the update-alternatives thingy ? > > No because I (now) know that that will change the window manager > gnome-wm picks, but my problem is that no window manager is starting at > all, not that I want to switch from one to the other. > > The fact that I can't change the window manager is secondary. I'd like > to know what I did that made gnome-session stop launching a window > manager in the first place. Maybe the gnome-wm you run gave an empty result (for whatever reason) and thus overwrote the gconf key with it, or with a failing wm or something such. Have you tried tracing the calls (or looking at .gnome-errors, if that still work, to see if there was something getting called and failing, or just plain nothing getting called ? Friendly, Sven Luther
