[Techtalk] gnome, nautilus, sawfish & metacity???

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

Erin,

On Sun, Sep 08, 2002 at 07:13:24PM -0500, Erin Raasch wrote:
> The first really isn't a problem, more of a curiosity - if I have
> sawfish set as the windowmanager in 1.4 and metacity in 2, the
> gnome1.4 control center reports metacity as the active windowmanager.
> This is true whether I'm in gnome2 with metacity running, or whether
> I'm gnome1.4 and sawfish is running.  I can (from the control center)
> switch to sawfish, which then changes gnome2 to sawfish, but I cannot
> change back to metacity from the control center - it always times out.
> Not a problem since I've learned how to use the command line to do
> this, but interesting.

The general consensus from "those who know" (e.g. the guy who wrote the
window manager switcher for GNOME 1) is that being able to switch
backwards and forwards between window managers is very hard to get right
consistently. This is why there is no control centre applet to do it in
GNOME 2, for example.

I do not really understand why you are seeing the behaviour you are, but
you are in very "undefined" territory here: metacity is not meant to
work with GNOME 1.4 and switching window managers is meant to be a
command-line only thing in GNOME 2.

That is nowhere near helpful, I realise, but it's the best I can do.

> The second issue is the actual problem.  Twice now, when I've logged
> into gnome1.4, nautilus has not started, and I haven't been able to
> start it either from the (SuSE) menu or from the run command.  The
> first time this happened, it just started up after about the fifth
> time I logged back in to gnome1.4.  Now it has stopped running again,
> but I haven't been able to get it going.  It's running fine in gnome2,
> BTW.  Has anyone experienced this, or does someone have a clue as to
> why it happens or what I can do to get it running again?  

I have not seen this problem, but what happens when you just run
nautilus from a terminal in GNOME 1.4? Any obvious error messages. There
are a number of things that _could_ be going wrong, like portions (or
all) of GNOME 2's Nautilus being picked up by accident, but I can't say
for sure.

You might also look at the output of 'ldd $(which nautilus)' to ensure
that no GNOME 2 libraries are linked against it (which will involve
knowing the general prefix under which your GNOME 2 libraries are
installed). This could be a bit painful, since there are 54 libraries
linked against the version of Nautilus I have here. :(

Malcolm