Is Gnome windown manager switching broken again?

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 09:59:58AM +0100, hdfssk wrote:
> Michal, I ran into the same thing trying to replace metacity with
> e16. The problem is that gnome expects to find a desktop file in
> /usr/share/applications matching the value in
> desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager.. in your
> case it's looking for /usr/share/applications/wmaker.desktop..

That was somebody else who tried windowmaker.  I never used that
particular manager but these are details.

> and if that desktop file isn't there, it won't start your window
> manager, logging "WARNING: Unable to find provider 'wmaker' of
> required component 'windowmanager'" to ~/.xsessions-error.

That I figured out from what may pass for a "documentation", i.e.
a comment in /usr/bin/gnome-wm which says:

# NOTE: DON'T USE THIS.  Please have your window manager install
# a desktop file and change the gconf key
# /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager

The problem was that at a time of my attempts this still did not work.
Of course what "a desktop file" need to contain is left to your
divinations.

> Adding a wmaker.desktop file to /usr/share/applications should fix
> this..

After your posting I tried again and this time this indeed helped.
Maybe my sawfish.desktop file, with which I was exerimenting, was
missing something although I modified it from a copy of
an existing metacity.desktop.  Or maybe I was trying "too early"?

This detail that in gconf you also have
/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/default and
/apps/gnome-session/rh/window_manager surely does not help.
Especially when you are using GUI it is very easy to mix things up.
Note differences between "window_manager" and "windowmanager".

   Thanks,
   Michal