Stop Microsoft
Operating Systems => Linux and UNIX => Topic started by: heljy on 10 October 2002, 11:52
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I am running mandrake 8.0 with gnome (1.x) as my desktop environment. When I first setup, it has this nice window manager with icons on the desktop and the gnome panel and all that.
However, I couldnt get that back once I tried iceWM and blackbox. The only option that I have for wm is only iceWM, blackbox, and sawfish. I know that sawfish is the default WM for gnome, but when I started it, it only has a blue screen with NOTHING on it, no icons, no nice panels and only the middle mouse button works (with very limited options) :(
Is there anyway where I can get back the orignal desktop that I have (as in the original setting).
Thanks in advance.
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Rename any directories under your home directory that start with ".gnome" to something else. Log off and back on it should create a new default gnome desktop when you log in using the Gnome desktop option.
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I tried doing that, but it didnt work. Firstly, I start X using 'startx'. And if I use mandrake's graphical login screen, i would have to choose a default wm. So do I choose sawfish?
I am currently using iceWM by 'exec icewm' in the .xinitrc file.
Do i have to change anything?
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I'm not sure if Mandrake is the same, but in RedHat you would run this command:
$ switchdesk GNOME
You surely should change your .xinitrc to launch Gnome rather than IceWM if that is what you want. I have 2.x and it's called "gnome-session", not sure if it was the same in 1.x. Also you might want to look at your .Xclients file if you have one.
If you don't have Gnome on your graphical login then I am wondering if you don't have it installed.
[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]
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Well, I will look into it. Actually I am not very bothered by it, iceWM is working great for me. Just dun like it when you cant control what you want :D
[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: heljy ]
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You might be interested in this trick:
http://www.cafecomputer.com/page6faq.htm (http://www.cafecomputer.com/page6faq.htm)
It makes it so you can type "startx gnome", "startx icewm" instead of having to change your .xinitrc file every time you want to switch desktops.
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nice page, void main! i think i will download FVWM95 (http://www.plig.org/xwinman/fvwm95.html)now, as a KDE replacement and see how it fares! :D i keep an eye out for linux things that will help my windows/mac raised girlfriend feel at home with linux.
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It's sorta Win95 like. It's the first one I ever used that had the start bar type menu like Windows has. It surely is more lightweight than KDE or Gnome. Now I would be surprised if you can run KDE/Gnome programs under it but they may have added that support in. It's been quite a few years since I used that one.
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just for the record, i spent a long time tracking down fvwm95, and i found it at http://www.go.dlr.de/fresh/linux/slackware/slackware/xap/ (http://www.go.dlr.de/fresh/linux/slackware/slackware/xap/)
i just thought i would post the url to save somebody else doing the rounds and getting as many dead links as i got.
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The script works really great! Thanks!
However, my system still doesnt want to run gnome-session...
Do I need to install something?? :confused:
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I'm guessing you probably need to install Gnome.
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try doing a 'which gnome-session' just to see if it is installed, and if so, if it is in your path.
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You may have meant this but "which" will not tell you if something is installed. It will only tell you if a specific command is in your PATH and is executable. If I were him I would do a:
rpm -qa | grep gnome
or more specifically
rpm -qa | grep gnome-session
rpm -qa | grep gnome-desktop
[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]
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yup, would that work only if he had used rpms to install it though? (this would have been the case though, wouldn't it, if it had been installed by the linux installer) What would one have to do to check this out if the package had not been an rpm one? would you have to then use 'find'?
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Yes it would have had to have been installed as an RPM which I assume it was since he is on Mandrake. But if he did not use RPMS and used source then he could always do a "locate gnome-session" which will search the locate database created by the "updatedb" command which is pretty much installed and run daily by default on all Linux distros these days.
It would search for any occurance of "gnome-session" appearing in the name of a file or directory on your hard drive, but do it *much* faster than the "find" command can do as it searches a database. updatedb is usually run nightly from cron on a default install.
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Ok, I did install Mandrake using rpm. And I did a search using
rpm -qa |grep gnome and it shows me a list of stuff
but when I tried both
rpm -qa |grep gnome-session
rpm -qa |grep gnome-desktop
it didnt return anything, so I guess thats not installed :(
BUT I used which gnome-sesson and it returned:
/usr/bin/gnone-session
and I tried both find and locate
'locate gnome-session' didnt return anything, so I guess its not found
'find gnome-session' returned this:
find: gnome-session: No such file or directory
Anyway, I went ahead and opened up software manager that manages the rpm installed/installable. I looked up Graphical Workstation and Gnome Workstation but didnt find gnome-session or gnome-desktop that i can install. I went ahead and looked at the rpms that I have installed and didnt find gnome-session and gnome-desktop either.
Does that mean I have to install it from the source?
BTW, thanks for being so helpful! (http://smile.gif) Really appreciate it.
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Actually with Gnome 1.x I don't believe there was a "gnome-session" or "gnome-desktop" RPM, and I don't use Mandrake so I don't know if they package Gnome differently than RedHat. But if you did a "which gnome-session" and it returned "/usr/bin/gnome-session" it would definitely appear that the command is there so it must be part of another package. If you do an:
rpm -qif /usr/bin/gnome-session | more
it will show you which RPM/package contains that file. Since "locate" didn't find it then you probably don't have it set up, doesn't mean that the software isn't installed. The easiest way to use the "find" command to find any occurance of "gnome-session" on your hard drive you would type:
find / | grep gnome-session
which will return pretty much the same thing "locate" would if you had it configured, only it will take much much longer as it has to search through your entire hard drive.
From what you say I believe you probably have Gnome installed. I have never been a Gnome user until just recently so I'm no expert on it. You can probably go to the Gnome web site and get more information on configuration (but remember that you are using v1.x which is a little different then 2.x).
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locate doesn't need too much setting up; you can run "updatedb" to update the database (or locate -u). must be done as root, since it stores the file permissions with the file names and prevents users from "locating" a file that they have no access to. basically all it does is store the file names in a compressed database for fast searching.
as for gnome, ave oyu looked in the default install directories? in slackware it used to be "/opt/gnome", but it got changed to "/usr/share/gnome" in 8.1, with all of the apps being in their own subdirectories in "/usr/share".
Gnome actually runs on top of another window manager, such as ice, sawfish, enlightenment, etc. If it is installed, look into the file "/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.gnome" (your directory may vary; update your locatedb and locate the file), which will be the x windows start up script for the gnome desktop. (the other "xinitrc.*" scripts control the startup of other WMs.) The last two lines should be
And finally, I wrote my own script to allow me to switch desktops: it presents a small text menu with choices, and the appropriate script is symlinked to "~/.xinitrc" (which "startx" will check first to control the start of the WM). see the man page for startx for details.
incedentally, can anyone tell me how to compile gnome 2.x from scratch? I would like to try it out... but I can't seem to get the order correct.
-t.
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quote:
Originally posted by beltorak0:
locate doesn't need too much setting up; you can run "updatedb" to update the database (or locate -u). must be done as root, since it stores the file permissions with the file names and prevents users from "locating" a file that they have no access to. basically all it does is store the file names in a compressed database for fast searching.
That is true however the database will not stay current unless you run updatedb from a cron job that runs nightly. Still very simple. It takes updatedb a little while to run (probably longer than the find command would take to parse through the entire filesystem). So you don't want to have to updatedb every time you want to get an accurate "locate".
In RedHat8 this script is used:
/etc/cron.daily/slocate.cron
which contains:
You could set up a similar script on any distro (many come set up like this by default).
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just a thought, re: what's up with GNOME, if an older version of gnome is called different things and is in different directories, then the programs that are looking for it might only look in the locations that gnome is supposed to be in if it is a recent version, follow? could this be the case?
also, heljy, if i was using find for this, i would try 'find / -name gnome-* -print' which checks the / directory recursively for anything named "gnome-*" and prints the output on standard out (your screen).