Knome Guide: Stealing KDE's Eye Candy

[poofyhairguy]

by edge flipping, do you mean virtual desktops going 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, ... i hate it, too. one of the only reasons i don't use kde...

Yep. I dislike it as well....wish I could turn it off...

[benplaut]

Yep. I dislike it as well....wish I could turn it off...

worst thing ever invented! also, metacity is pretty much the only WM that doesn't do it

[SuperDiscoMachine V.5.7-3]

First off, nice guide!
Thanks a lot.

Some comments though:
I think there is an easier way to make kwin the default gnome window manager:
a. Open a terminal
b. Remove metacity from your gnome-session:

gnome-session-remove metacity

c. Start kwin:

kwin &

d. Save your new session:

gnome-session-save

Now log out and log back in and kwin should be your window manager.

I also don't understand, why you start kcontrol as root, that is, with gksudo kcontrol. There is no need for it as you just want to control how kwin behaves for your user, or am I missing something?

Also, there's one problem that seems quite trivial, but that I'm unable to solve. I'd like to have a run dialogue when I press Alt+F2. Now obviously, the gnome run dialogue doesn't work and I don't know how it is called anyway, so that I have no way to make a custom shortcut. And the kde run dialogue isn't installed and I can't figure out what package provides it. Any clues?

[Iandefor]

You never stop, do you, Poofy ?

I'll probably give this a try sometime soon, but for now, I'm happy without compositing.

[Azriphale]

I'll have a look at what provides it, and how to do keyboard shortcuts when i get home later. I installed all of kde3.5 to have a look at it, so it may be easier for me to find.

[SuperDiscoMachine V.5.7-3]

I'll have a look at what provides it, and how to do keyboard shortcuts when i get home later. I installed all of kde3.5 to have a look at it, so it may be easier for me to find.

Thanks.

[woedend]

poofy great writeup, everything went great but it kinda borked on me in dapper. Maximized windows had their title bar hidden by the gnome top panel, and the tope panel wasn't at the top, there was about a half inch of space above it that behaved like a tiny second desktop. But I did get a general feel for it and I think i'll stick with broken xcompmgr...gnome impresses me far more than kde windows.

[Azriphale]

I thought that it would probably be better to use the gnome run dialog than the kde one that you suggested.

After doing a bit of research on the gnome run dialog, it seems that a little while ago the "gnome-run" binary disappeard and the dialog was integrated into the gnome panel.

This means that without metacity you cannot directly assign Alt+F2 to open the gnome run dialog.

This may sound like bad news, but
A) The KDE "run command" dialog is, I believe, integrated into kdesktop so you don't want to use that (may as well start using KDE, which I guess you don't want to do)
B) I have come across a simple solution. I am not sure how well it will work for you, but try it and let me know. When I get home I'll give it a shot too.

The solution requires that you compile a simple C app that talks to the Gnome panel and asks it to start the run dialog. So first you need to do this:

apt-get install build-essential libx11-dev

It may ask you to install some other dependencies, just answer yes.

a file called gnome-run.c.txt is attached to this post. Download it, and rename it to gnome-run.c

In the console, run this command to compile it:

gcc gnome-run.c -o gnome-run -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11

I'm not completely certain thet the -L flag to that is correct, tho.
Try to execute that and see if it works (just type "./gnome-run" in the console where you compiled it). If it does, create a new launcher on your desktop, and make it run that file (you'll need the full path here) to see if it works when not running in the console. If it doen't work, then I'll need to see what can be done later.


Oh, and in kcontrol, is there nothing anywhere in there to set keybindings?

Try looking here:
http://docs.kde.org/development/en/k...r-scripts.html
and here:
http://docs.kde.org/development/en/k...xtra-keys.html

[SuperDiscoMachine V.5.7-3]

First off, thank you Azriphale. Great explanations of what is going on.
You are right I think, the kde run dialogue is integrated into kdesktop and if I understand it correctly, it uses some dcop call to start it, which didn't work for me with gnome.

Thanks also for all your efforts with the gnome-run dialogue. I was aware that the menu entry for it had gone, but I didn't know that even the excecutable was gone.

I have however found an other workaround. While I'm now happily mixing Gnome and KDE anyway, I figured why not throw xfce into the mix? So now I installed xfce4-utils, which contains xfrun4 (may be a bit of an overkill, as there are also other run dialogues out there, but it works for me) and assigned a custom shortcut to it. And what can I say, I have a working run dialogue again.

Thanks again for all your efforts, greatly appreciated.

[Azriphale]

Sure, its not trouble. Glad you got something that works tho. I'm going to need to do something like this later anyway, if I continue to use kwin.