Hello!

Well... I give up. After several months (on & off, of course) of trying to figure out window managers, I've finally decided to ask for help...

My main problem: All I want is window manager that will a) open windows centered and b) if I do move the window from center, remember where I put it for the next time I open it.

When I first started this task, I assumed (incorrectly) that this would've been relatively easy.

I use gnome in fedora. It wasn't too bad switching from metacity to sawfish, but I don't like the "matched windows" way of remembering window positions in sawfish. And I can't always figure out how to make it work, either. For example, I'd like my xine output window higher than center when it opens, but so far, everything I've tried hasn't worked. (I had no problems with the xine panel, btw.)

So... I thought I'd try fluxbox based on it's number one ranking with linuxquestions readers. And, after I fought for a while (I read most posts on this site, the manuals and lots of googled sites), I still can't get it to a) load on startup (I can if I 'startx', can't the other way).

I did manage to get it working enough to realize that there was no simple 'remember window placement' or 'center' option but before I went any further, I decided to write.

Is there a window manager that will do what I want? If so, why not? (This isn't sarcasm... I don't understand this stuff enough, yet, and would actually like to know.) If not, could someone tell me a) why fluxbox is considered the best and b) help me figure out why I can't get it to work properly? (I'll explain my startup problems in more detail, if needed.)

Thanks in advance!

Ryan

Most apps take a -g or -geom or --geometry (or whatever) option which will position the window. This is generally independent of the wm. And recent (0.9.x) versions of flux have a 'remember' function.

As far as getting 'random app' to spontaneously open precisely centered, I don't think you can really swing that. You can just specify special positions for particular apps in the flux menu or on the command line.

Fluxbox is considered best probably because it does all (almost) it's supposed to do and nothing it isn't - it's easily configured - it looks good - etc.

It's tied for my favorite wm (almost) - I'm using ice at the moment but I suspect I'll switch back to flux at 1.0. Got tired of 0.1.14's nearly useless toolbar and all the shifting that's going on with 0.9.x. Ice is stabler (in the sense of not changing as rapidly - both are quite stable in the sense of never having crashed on me) and has a great taskbar.

Thanks for --geometry tip, that's a good start (it worked great for xine).

As for using fluxbox not working on startup, I tried making the .xinitrc, .xsessions (in both /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions and /etc/X11/dm/Sessions) files, and everything else the instructions I read told me to do and nothing works. I have a file called .xsession-errors in my home folder, does that have anything to do with it?

Ryan

I dunno - just out of curiosity (I've asked this before but maybe everybody took it as rhetorical), what's the advantage of using display managers like that? I used one with my first distro because it was default and I didn't know I could change it but I've never used one since. (Well, Mandrake and Debian tried to throw me into one but I switched runlevels and killed the initscript.) I just use the startx wrapper.

But if you do want to use it, maybe describing what it does would help others help you. Does flux just not appear as an option or does it crash trying to start up or what?

AFAIK, dm's ignore ~/.xinitrc so ~/.Xsession may be the file you want. If that's not working, maybe post it up so people can see if there's an error in the script. (I can't even remember what they're supposed to look like.) Worse, I think gdm does its own thing and ignores ~/.Xsession. As far as ~/.xsessionerrors, I suspect 'tail'ing that file might either be useless notices of general errors or it might tell you what's going wrong with flux.

Sorry I can't be more (any) help.

enlightenment seems to do all of those things for me actually.

Oh yeah, in answer to your questions, if you want to use a different wm in Fedora, the usual session manager rules don't apply. For instance, for Fluxbox you will need to create a Fluxbox.desktop file in your /etc/X11/dm/Sessions directory containing the following text:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Fluxbox
Type=Application
Icon=
Exec=fluxbox

And you will do this for other wm's as well. Some require you to actually put in the full path to the executable file for that particular wm. Anyways, good luck!