Desktop panning and a nitpick (was Re: How do I disable/modify desktop panning?)

[David Wijnants]

You could work your way up the process tree to see how you are related
to X, but there are quite a number of scenarios:

- exec the window manager at the bottom of .xinitrc, and get it to
  run the panel as a module. In this case, the panel can send
  commands to the window manager. This is what I do at work, I
  run xfwm, but with my own Tcl/Tk panel; it is also more or less
  what xfwm does by default.

- spawn the window manager first, and then exec the panel. In this
  case, when the panel exits, the window manager is killed, along
  with any other X applications. This is how I used to run the xfce
  panel with mwm; the panel warns you correctly that you are about
  to log out.

- run the panel from an xterm. In this case exiting the panel will
  have no effect on the rest of X, but xfce gives a misleading
  warning.

- get the panel to look at its children to see if one of them is a
  window manager. This works ok with xfwm and mwm, but catering for
  the millions of other window managers might be a problem (and it
  might not be very portably either).

- get spawned by a session manager. In this case, the panel exits,
  but the rest stays up until the session manager is closed (unless
  the panel has a way of closing the session manager). I don't use
  session management myself, so I'm not sure how this would work
  in practice.

- and probably many other ways of doing the same things...


I hope this helps. Maybe others could share their own experiences
of using XFce in other environments.


Dave.



Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> 
> Dave,
> 
> That's not what I meant. I meant the program that controls the xsession.
> When you quit this program X will quit as well. For xfce3 this is xfwm
> if I'm correct and the panel asks xfwm to quit if you quit the panel.
> 
> For xfce4 I'm now running xfce4 as the controlling app, so quitting the
> panel will quit X. Gnome uses a separate session manager as controlling
> app. There's also ROX-Session.
> 
> I was wondering if there is a way to find out which app controls the X
> session.
> 
> This is all very much off-topic of course ;-)
> 
> Jasper
> 
> On Fri, 26 Jul 2002 16:24:41 +0100
> David Wijnants <dwijnants at askalix.com> wrote:
> 
> > A program can guess that it is running as a module by looking at the
> > command line parameters, the two numbers (e.g. 7 and 4) are the file
> > descriptors through which it exchanges commands with xfce (such as
> > 'Quit' or 'Desk 2').
> >
> > Dave.
> >
> >
> > Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
> > >
> > > I wonder if it is possible to know if the panel is the
> > > 'session-controlling' app (I don't know how this is called)?
> > >
> > > Jasper
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Xfce at moongroup.com
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