Ok, I think this will work for me. I am using gnome and when I give it the kill <gnome pid> && enlightenment it logs me out. You said make sure I "save session" when I log out but I can't see how to do that. In gnome when I press the logout button it asks me if I want to save session, is there somewhere I can make it save everytime?

You don't want to kill Gnome's process id. You need to fin the winow manager's id. In a normal installation, I think it's metacity. So a ps aux | grep metacity ought to give you the right entry. Killing the window manager should not log you out of Gnome. If you have any windows open, you'll see them lose their borders momentarily, and then get the ones from enlightenment. I think I saw another thread about changing window managers a few days ago. I'll see if I can hunt it down and link you to it. It might have a cleaner solution.

i reinstalled all of the packages, tried doing ./configure --prefix=/usr
did ldconfig (as root) after each installation

i still get the same errors about not finding freetype.h when tryin to make enlightenment

(i've got freetype 1, not 2)

any ideas?

[edit] scratch that, when i killed the old process and launched enlightenment, all i get is a blank screen of a solid color w/ a 1" bar running horizontally... and my mouse pointer. ever seen this? and i still get the freetype.h error[/edit]