therning.org/ magnus

A few days ago I create the page on LXDE and Xmonad on the Xmonad area of the Haskell Wiki. It’s very short, mainly due to it being very simple to set it up. My config is a bit bare-bones at the moment though and I’m sure others have more to contribute.

And yes! This means I’ve left the Gnome camp. Quite possibly for good.

The upgrade to Gnome3 in ArchLinux a few days ago broke my previous setup that combined xmonad with Gnome. Gnome 3 has a fallback mode, but I found that the instructions for replacing metacity under Gnome 2 no longer worked. With some help from the xmonad mailing list (in particular Jens Petersen and his efforts of providing a working setup on Fedora) I now finally have a working setup again. Here’s how I did it.

Add a session file for use by Gnome Session (/usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/xmonad.session):

[GNOME Session]
Name=Xmonad session
RequiredComponents=gnome-panel;gnome-settings-daemon;
RequiredProviders=windowmanager;notifications;
DefaultProvider-windowmanager=xmonad
DefaultProvider-notifications=notification-daemon

And a desktop file for GDM (/usr/share/xsessions/xmonad-gnome-session.desktop):

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Xmonad GNOME
Comment=Tiling window manager
TryExec=/usr/bin/gnome-session
Exec=gnome-session --session=xmonad
Type=XSession

That’s all it takes. Of course I’ve raised a ticket against the Arch package.

After installing a basic Arch system and adding X.org it still isn’t very usable. My desktop of choice is Gnome, so that’s what I installed next, with a few extra packages to make it prettier and more useful.

I found out the hard way a few weeks ago that if you install gnome without gnome-extras then it’s a bad idea to install gdm and configure your system to boot to X. That way you’ll end up in a situation where your desktop doesn’t have an X terminal. I made sure to avoid that situation this time around. After installing gnome,gnome-extras and gdm I noticed that both gdm and policykit created users with uid 120 and 102, respectively. Just like exptected from services they have low uids. What surprised me was that they ended up having gid 1001 and 1002. That looks like bugs to me I decided to fix that up manually myself by editing the group file (using vigr of course) and then searching for all file with the offending gids (using find / -gid 1001 for the first, with obvious changes to find the second).

After configuring gdm I realised I also needed gdm-themes And I also added a few pretty fonts, and removed a few of the unpretty ones:

# pacman -S ttf-ms-fonts ttf-cheapskate artwiz-fonts ttf-bitstream-vera
# pacman -Rns xorg-fonts-75dpi xorg-fonts-100dpi

Then of course I needed to install xmonad:

# pacman -S xmonad-contrib

Co-ercing Gnome to actually use it was interesting though. I followed the instructions for running Xmonad in Jaunty, but that wasn’t enough. I also needed to place a file named xmonad.desktop in /usr/share/applications/ with the following contents (greatly inspired by the metacity.desktop found in the same location):

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Xmonad
Exec=xmonad
NoDisplay=true
X-GNOME-WMName=Xmonad
X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=WindowManager
X-GNOME-Provides=windowmanager

After that it was time to install stuff that is useful First off was Thunderbird, which I immidiately had to equip with a few plug-ins of course. When setting up my mail account again I noticed that my Gnome session wasn’t quite the way I wanted—there was no gpg-agent running. After a quick check with the people on arch-general, without receiving any definitive resolution, I wrote my own little hack to address it. Of course I posted it in the thread I had started, but I might as well include it here too:

--- /etc/gdm/Xsession_orig  2009-04-27 17:13:50.346834448 +0100
+++ /etc/gdm/Xsession   2009-04-27 17:16:25.310151728 +0100
@@ -213,6 +213,14 @@
   fi
 fi

+# add seahorse if found
+seahorse="`gdmwhich seahorse-agent`"
+if [ -n "${seahorse}" ] && [ -x "${seahorse}" ]; then
+    command="seahorse-agent --execute $command"
+elif [ -z "${seahorse}" ]; then
+    echo "$0: seahorse not found!"
+fi
+
 # add ssh-agent if found
 sshagent="`gdmwhich ssh-agent`"
 if [ -n "$sshagent" ] && [ -x "$sshagent" ] && [ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ]; then

There’s one more tool I can’t live without, parcellite, which is also available pre-built on Arch.

I stumbled on this email thread on starting Xmonad in Fedora 10. In anticipation of Gnome 2.24 being installable from Debian Experimental I dropped the following into /usr/share/applications/xmonad.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Xmonad
Exec=xmonad
NoDisplay=true
X-GNOME-WMName=Xmonad
X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=WindowManager
X-GNOME-Provides=windowmanager
X-GNOME-Autostart-Notify=true

and modified the GConf key /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/current to hold the value /usr/bin/xmonad. Last but not least I removed my ~/.gnomerc. Log out, log in. Enjoy!

Yes, this is mentioned on the Xmonad wiki, though with slightly less details. I’ll hold off updating the page until I have Gnome 2.24 on my desktop.