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ewlabonte 07-16-2019 10:30 AM

Weird affect display manager has on the configuration of netwmpager.
 
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First of all, this is not a severe problem that I need resolved. I just can't explain why it happens and am curious if anyone else might know. I'm running Debian Buster. My favorite window manager is pekwm and I usually have conky and netwmpager running in it. Netwmpager doesn't come in the Debian repositories so I downloaded the source code from version 2.05 and compiled it. It compiled easily. But netwmpager displayed weirdly until I tweaked the config file to where It was displaying correctly. But it still acted a little weird, but not to the point where it was unusable. Anyway, since it's a new version of Debian I decided to try out different desktop environments. I installed Gnome. Gdm comes along with it and I decided to enable that too. Trying Gnome out reminded me of all the reasons I hate it so I went back to pekwm. To my surprise netwmpager was displaying wrong. I tweaked the config file again until it displayed correctly. That also corrected the weird behavior that was happening before. Eventually I switched back to lightdm, and voila, netwmpager was screwed up again. I put the config back to what I had had before and it displayed correctly, albeit with the weird behavior. I went back to gdm just to check if the display manager was the cause of the problem, and it was.
My question, how could a display manager affect the way netwmpager reads its config file?

The first pic below is how netwmpager is supposed to look. The second is how it looks when I switch from gdm to lightdm, before I correct the config file. The third is how it looks after I correct the file for lightdm, then switch to gdm.

This is the section of .config/netwmpager/config which makes it display correctly when gdm is running but wrong when lightdm is running:

# desktop layout
# set both to -1 to use default values (set by window manager)
cols = 3
rows = 3
desk_cols = 3
desk_rows = 3

And this is that same section when it displays correctly under lightdm and incorrectly under gdm:

# desktop layout
# set both to -1 to use default values (set by window manager)
# cols = 3
# rows = 3
desk_cols = 3
desk_rows = 3

When those two lines are commented out (or set to -1) it works when lightdm is running. When they are set to 3 and uncommented, it works when gdm is running.

This all seems screwed up to me. Currently I'm running gdm because the weird behavior doesn't occur when I run gdm. But I can't for the life of me figure out how the display manager would affect how the application reads its own configuration file.


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