Can't Start xfwm4

[John Lowell]

biju & olivier,

Thanks for your helpful replies.

It would seems that I've been acting on a mistaken premise: That xfwm4, when
used as a stand-alone, would function in a way similar to fluxbox or waimea
and offer similar capabilities. One does well not to force square pegs into
round holes, eh? :-)

Since it had not been my choice to install a full scale DE, but rather to
use something substantially lighter simply to open programs, it looks as
though I'll have to set xfwm4 aside. Its clearly intended to operate only
inside the xfce4 envelope.

Very best wishes to you  both and to the xfce4 desktop project.

John Lowell

----- Original Message -----
From: "Biju Chacko" <biju_chacko at vsnl.net>
To: "XFce is a lightweight desktop environment for various UNIX systems."
<xfce at xfce.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 12:14 AM
Subject: Re: Can't Start xfwm4


> On Mon, 08 Sep 2003 17:19:06 -0400, John Lowell wrote:
>
> > jasper & oliver,
> >
> > Many thanks for your replies. I have managed to locate and install the
> > startup-notification package from the repository of my distro, Arch
Linux.
> >
> > Here's a follow-up question for you. As you know, I'm running exec xfwm4
via
> > a ~/.xinitrc file. Installing startup-notification certainly solved the
> > error message problem I was getting from XFree86, but I now reach xfwm4,
and
> > the mouse functions properly, but there is nothing else there. I
installed
> > the settings package as was recommended in the on-line manual, that is
to
> > say xfce-mcs-manager, and have even tried opening it by adding the lines
> > exec xfce-mcs-manager and exec-settings-show to ~/.xinitrc but nothing
> > changes. I have the plain background and mouse mobility and that's all.
I
> > had assumed that xfwm4 might function like fluxbox or openbox. I'm wrong
> > about this?
>
> xfwm4 is a window manager *only*. It doesn't do anything else. So if *you*
don't
> start a window to manage, you won't have anything to look at. You also
won't
> have any way to start up programs, because xfwm4 doesn't provide menus or
> launchers or taskbars or things.
>
> OTOH, if you installed xfrun4 then xfwm4 provides a default key-binding to
> launch it: Alt-F2. You could then use it to run whatever apps you want.
>
> An easier method would be to run an xterm from your .xinitrc. All-in-all,
I
> think running the complete environment would be your best bet for getting
a
> useful desktop.
>
> At the very minimum, I'd suggest running xfwm4, xfdesktop and
xfce4-iconbox.
>
> HTH,
>
> -- b
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Biju 'botsie' Chacko                        biju_chacko at vsnl dot net
> http://www.symonds.net/~botsie          Public Key available on request
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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