Turning off Gnome services

John_Jason_Jordan · 2012-03-26 04:52:26

Since upgrading my laptop from Fedora 14 to Fedora 16 I have used Xfce exclusively as my desktop environment and have come to love it far more than Gnome. I did use Gnome for years previoulsy, and it is still installed, although I have yet to log in to it since the upgrade to Fedora 16.

At the moment I have a problem with Caribou, which is apparently a screen keyboard. Every time I log in I get a popup that Caribou cannot be started. I can't remember why I installed it, but it seems to be part of Gnome. Attempting to uninstall it I get a warning that it is a dependency for what appears to be most of Gnome. This is probably bogus, because I ran Gnome fine before without Caribou, but nevertheless I don't want to risk uninstalling or messing up Gnome. Google found me a lot of posts about how to disable Caribou (rather than uninstall it), but they refer to settings in the Gnome desktop that do not exist in Xfce. It is not listed in the Autostart tab of Settings Manager.

However, looking in Settings Manager > Session and Startup > Advanced tab I note that the box for "Launch Gnome services on startup" is checked. I can uncheck it, but before I do so I would like to know what disaster will befall me when I restart the computer. Will parts of Xfce fail to work? Will I still be able to launch Nautilus? (Because I need it to search for files.) Here I am assuming that unchecking it wil prevent Caribou from trying to start which will solve my problem. I could use some advice here. Thanks in advance.

gnome_refugee · 2012-03-26 05:19:21

I'm running Fedora 16 Xfce (on a netbook) without Gnome services, no issues. This advice

http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session/preferences

says the option only starts Gnome keyring. So you want Nautilus rather than Thunar because you want to do filename searches? Have you considered Catfish?

John_Jason_Jordan · 2012-03-26 05:55:18

Thanks. Now I need to ask Google more exactly what Gnome keyring does. Evidently it has to do with passwords, but what happens if I need to do "sudo" and it can't find my password? Also, turning it off may not help my problem with Caribou. What I really need is a way to stop Caribou from launching on login, but I can't find any setting to do that.

Re Catfish: Development stalled in 2008. It is annoying to use. It can't even remember the window size, location or settings. And since it is not a file manager you can't drag and drop a file to another folder. I am happy with Thunar, but it desperately needs a search utility. I use Nautilus only when I need to search for files.

gnome_refugee · 2012-03-26 06:04:37

Apologies, I should have added that I'm running a number of Gnome apps on that Fedora 16 Xfce netbook, without the Gnome-services-on-startup tick.

Also apologies, I don't know exactly how Fedora handles password management, but I wouldn't think sudo-ing in a terminal would be overseen by the DE...

Let us know how you go.

Nick · 2012-03-26 06:19:23

We have a branch ready to be merged in master for 4.10 that changes the behavior of the GNOME and KDE compat modes. Previously we started all autostart files with OnlyShowIn GNOME or KDE if the setting was enable. In 4.10 you will always see all the non-XFCE services in autostart, but not enabled by default. The checkboxes only enable gnome-keyring or kdeinit4.

Reason is that quite often GNOME or KDE services conflict with Xfce services (gnome-settings-daemon vs xfsettingsd for example).

John_Jason_Jordan · 2012-03-26 07:01:25

Thanks for the enlightenment. I finally found Caribou in gnome-session-properties, which I was able to launch from a terminal. I have also unchecked the box for "Launch Gnome services on startup." Now I am going to reboot. If you don't hear back I solved the problem of Caribou starting and I still have sudo and everything else running without Gnome services. Crossing fingers.

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#1 2012-03-26 04:52:26

Turning off Gnome services

#2 2012-03-26 05:19:21

Re: Turning off Gnome services

#3 2012-03-26 05:55:18

Re: Turning off Gnome services

#4 2012-03-26 06:04:37

Re: Turning off Gnome services

#5 2012-03-26 06:19:23

Re: Turning off Gnome services

#6 2012-03-26 07:01:25

Re: Turning off Gnome services

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