[Techtalk] Red Hat/Windowmaker woes

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 07:44:32PM +0800 or thereabouts, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> I'm almost certainly going to regret posting this, since Telsa has way
> more experience than me at using Window Maker, but I may be able to fill
> in some blanks here.

Hardly. I want to appoint Malcolm my personal proofreader because he
is always adding the stuff I forgot. Or mistyped.
 
> > #!/bin/sh
> > waker
> 
> I'm willing to bet you actually spelt it 'wmaker', though. I don't seem
> to have 'waker' installed on my system. :-)

Oh, cringe. Yes, "wmaker". I blame laptop keyboard.
 
> On my current box (a Red Hat 7.2 system), there is already a session
> setup for WindowMaker for gdm to use. The different session options are
> in /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions and according to 'rpm -qf
> /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/WindowMaker', that file was installed by the
> WindowMaker rpm (the WindowMaker version is 0.65).

Ah, much simpler then.

> > (You can get rid of gdm with rpm -e gdm, btw, and see whether
> > startx actually pays attention to your .xinitrc once gdm is
> > no longer there.)
> 
> I sort of cringe at this "remove it" advice, but that may be just my
> personal taste in sys adminning. In theory, startx should always look
> for $HOME/.xinitrc if you are starting from a normal console login. Just
> make sure that .xinitrc is executable.

I agree that it's drastic and I didn't make that clear. I'm not a
fan of display managers, largely because they pre-suppose a working 
X. Being me, this is not always a good assumption :) 

> This is an _important_ point that I would have shoved right up front! If
> you don't mind using GNOME, then just click on the GNOME entry in
> gdm/kdm/xdm (or whatever login manager pops up) and then choose the menu
> item Setting->Desktop->"Window Manager" and select WindowMaker from the
> list of choices there (assuming it's installed). Then, whenever GNOME
> starts up for you, you will get WindowMaker as your window manager.

I shall add to this that this works fine in RH 7.x, but in older
Red Hats, I used to get unexplained crashes when I changed the
window manager within Gnome, and occasionally end up without a
window manager. These days, to be on the safe side, I make sure
I have a gnome-terminal open before starting the window-manager
changing thing. Then, if something does go horribly wrong, I 
can type "wmaker &" into the terminal to get a window manager
back!

This shouldn't happen to you (and I don't think it's happened on
recent RHs to me) but that's a useful "just in case" option. For
me, at least.

Telsa, spell-checking this time!