[techtalk] Virtual desktops in GNOME

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Mon, Aug 14, 2000 at 10:46:22AM -0400 or thereabouts, Fan, Laurel wrote:
> Subba Rao, subb3 at attglobal.net, said:
> > I am pretty new to GNOME. My .xinitrc has gnome-session at the end.
> > What I am looking for is virtual desktops (like I had in 
> > FVWM2). I would like that available on the desktop or in the panel(if
> > that's what it is called) on the bottom.
> > 
> > Where can I find some sample configurations on how to setup 
> > virtual destops in GNOME?
> 
> It would depend on what window manager you're running.
> 
> I believe that with gnome you also run a window manager to take care of
> window-managing things like virtual desktops.  Last I looked, gnome's

Yup.

> default wm was enlightenment, but that could have changed, (or you could
> have changed it) since enlightenment has virtual desktops by default.  I

Varies by distro. Helix GNOME (sort of a distro of GNOME for various
common flavours of Linux and for Solaris) ships with sawfish. The 
latest RH beta has sawfish (and e is on there too, but if you ask 
for a GNOME workstation you get sawfish by default, I think). No 
clue on Mandrake or SuSE. And Caldera doesn't ship GNOME, does it?

> don't know if there's an easy way to find out what wm you're running (maybe
> there's a way to tell from GNOME?), but the way I'd do it is do a "ps a"

Opening the control centre and going to window manager should give
you both what's available to you and what you're running at the moment.
It should also give you the option to run the configuration tool for
the current window manager. (This gets a bit funky if you start madly
swapping window managers in that bit: I have ended up giggling at
an apparent window manager and "run configuration tool for.." an
entirely different window manager more than once.)

gtop is gnome's front end to top/ps/df/etc and you can find all manner
of things with that.

One place to find sample configuration files, for what it's worth,
is http://www.dotfiles.com which is always looking for contributions.
Alas, I see one .sawmillrc and about three thousand .fvwm(2)rcs. Not
what Subba needs, I suspect, but anyone wanting .fvwmrcs or .emacs
files is in luck over there.

Telsa