Xfce Forum

usimo

Member

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 2

[solved] xfwm4 with gnome

Hey, I'm trying to use gnome with xfwm4. I prefer gnome destkop icons and panel to xfce as you can do more stuff with them then  (ie. drag icons from desktop to panel via drag and drop instead of having to recreate panel launchers etc.). 
Xfwm4 works great, it has a LOT more production options then Metacity. Its focus options are great, it doesn't prevent my production application windows from coming to front of the window stack as Metacity does. In fact Metacity has many show-stopping 'bugs' which are hard-coded and have no config file/gui override options as its developer prefers to force his philosophy on users instead of letting users chose. It beats my logic as to why in the world Gnome chose this as its default window manager. Ok enough bragging: ).

Question: How do I have xfwm4 remember options I set with xfwm4-settings program inside a gnome session?

It _always_ defaults to its shipped theme. xfce-mcs-manager is autostarted but it doesn't seem to have a plugin for managing xfwm4 anymore. Writing stuff into ~/.xfwm4rc and ~/.local/xfce/xfwm/xfwm4rc doesn't seem to do anything anymore either (unfortunately, why oh why developers love to remove simple beauty of rc file control in favour of some 'automized' config creation nowdays?). I've been googling around, tried changing those xconf xml files in /etc/xdg ~/.local and elsewhere by hand but they seem to be autocreated to default anyway by some means.

xfwm4 version 4.6.1
xfce is version is also 4.6.1
gnome 2.26.1
xorg-x11-server-7.4-17.7.4
suse 11.1

herd

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2006-05-18

Posts: 143

Website

Re: [solved] xfwm4 with gnome

You will perhaps need to start xfconf instead of xfce-mcs-manager,
but if it will peacefully coexist with the gnome settings daemon is the remainig question.

Achieving a better integration of components was, if I remember correctly, a key goal for 4.6.
I think that even if it came at the expense of modularity, it was a worthy task in itself.

hth,

herd

usimo

Member

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 2

Re: [solved] xfwm4 with gnome

Ok, solved. /usr/lib64/xfconfd was running and being autostarted by default with gnome. Changing its settings via
xfce4-settings-editor worked as advertised but all changes would be magically reverted upon logout-login. So.. I went ahead and did a

sudo mv /etc/xdg/autostart/xfconf-migration-4.6.desktop /tmp

and viola! the xfwm4 settings are now savable (via xfconfd's frontend xfce4-settings-editor). It seems the script

/usr/lib64/xfce4/xfconf-migration/xfconf-migration-4.6.pl

was guilty of reverting default values. Wonder if I should report this as a "bug"?