ARRGH! Metacity is killing me.

[Andrew Farris]

On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 23:58 -0600, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 02:28:45PM +0930, Iain Buchanan wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 14:12, Andrew Farris wrote:
> > > 
> > > You should investigate XFCE4 which does a very nice job of mixing 'light
> > > weight' configurable managers with 'gnome-esque' niceties.
> > 
> > really?  last time I tried out xfce4 (fedora core 1) I could only get
> > the gnome-panel on one workspace.
> 
> This, I believe, is a "feature" which makes a number of workspaces
> in a gnome-panel a property of metacity.  In other words - broken
> as designed.  To get around that in sawfish I came up with the
> following code for ~/.sawfish/rc
> 
> ;; set a number of workspaces to what was recorded
> ;; by "Workspace Switcher Preferences"
> (set-number-of-workspaces
>  (let* ((str (make-string-output-stream))
>         (proc (make-process str)))
>    (call-process proc nil "gconftool-2"
>                  "-g" "/apps/metacity/general/num_workspaces")
>    (let ((var (get-output-stream-string str)))
>      (let ((nvar
>              (string-looking-at "[0-9]+" var)
>              (string->number (substring var (match-start) (match-end)))))
>        (cond
>         ((numberp nvar) nvar)
>         (t 4)))))) ;; if we do not know any better then make this 4
> 
> Of course a much simpler '(set-number-of-workspaces 6)', for
> example, would do the job too but changing that value would have
> to be done with an editor.  All that extra code is to squeeze that
> info out of metacity.  How to do that something similar for xfce4
> I have no idea at the moment.
> 
>    Michal

Not necessary with current xfce4, started as below in my xfce startup
script, gnome-panel works on all workspaces.  I agree the xfce4 panel
sucks, I just autohide it and keep it around for logout.

gnome-panel > /dev/null 2>&1 & disown
-- 
Andrew Farris, CPE senior (California Polytechnic State University, SLO)
fedora at andrewfarris.com :: lmorgul on irc.freenode.net
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men
to do nothing." (Edmond Burke)