xfce environment switching

- Kocil k0c1l at hotmail.com
Tue Dec 16 23:50:40 CET 2003


Jasper Huijsmans wrote:
>I don't understand that at all. The usefulness of an environment is
>affected by how easy it is to change to another environment?
>Honestly, I can't think of a good reason why we should try to support
>this.

Well, I'm trying to upgrade a distro.
The old version was consists of fluxbox, IceWM, windowmaker, XFCE3.
They could switch to each other nicely (using restart menu, you must be 
know).

Now ... XFCE4 is there. I should upgrade, shouldn't I ?
Unfortunatelly, XFCE4 became the naughty boy that can not play with the 
others :(

>The technical problem is that xfce consists of separate programs, so you 
>can't replace 'xfce' with 'icewm' like the first poster requested. I don't 
>doubt that it could be done, but I don't think it is really worth the 
>effort.
>If you use the session manager you can kill the window manager and start
>another one. You'd still be running the xfce session manager of course.

Well, a restart menu likt others would be perfect.
But quitting the panel of xfdesktop can kill the others xfce4-programs is 
adequate too.
We may make a script that do the switching.

However, that simple thing is not supported at the moment too.
I have tried xfce4-sessions. It kills xfdesktop, xfce4-panel, xfwm, but 
xfce-mcs-manager run still.

Allright ... so I made this launch script ...
=====================
#!/bin/sh

xfce-mcs-manager
PID1="$pids $!"

xfwm4 --daemon
PID2="$pids $!"

xfdesktop &
PID3="$pids $!"

xfce4-panel

# The user will quit from Panel, then we must killl the rest
kill $PID3
kill $PID2
kill $PID1

# This is just a debug to check if everything has been killed
ps -U $USER > ~/.xfce.log

# DO THE SWITCHING AFTER THIS
.....
===================


It looks perfect, doesn't it ?
Alas ... xfce-mcs-manager and also xfwm fork them self to another process.
So the PID1 and PID2 do not valid anymore !

I know that instead of kill $PID1, this would work

skill xfce-mcs-manager

But that is not safe in a multiuser (multisession) enviroment.

So yeah.
If somebody here just know how to completelly kill XFCE's programs for a 
particular session,
please share it.

I would be very gratefull.
Thanks.

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