xfce session manager question(s)

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:52:27 +0000 Chris G wrote:

> I presume that it's the xfce session manager (xfce4-session) that
> provides the EWMH functions/compatibility in xfce4 - yes?

No.  EWMH is the window manager's domain.

> Going on from that it also appears to handle most of the shutting down
> of xfce, if you run without xfce4-session things go rather
> strange! :-) I.e. the Quit button in the *menus* says it can't shut
> down...


Right.  Running without the session manager is more or less unsupported
at this point.  You're on your own coming up with default menus and
such that work.

> ... whereas the (identical icon) Quit button on the panel allows
> you to quit from the panel which does actually shut X down.

Only by coincidence.  When you run X, you usually start a bunch of
apps, but one app is run in the foreground and is thus the "session
controlling app."  Quitting this app will cause X to quit as well.
When you run with the session manager, xfce4-session is the
session-controlling app.  If you remove that from xinitrc, then the
default setup is for the panel to be the session-controlling app.  The
menu doesn't know how to make the panel quit (though I suppose it might
be modified to figure it out), so it doesn't do that.

> It also seems to me that the session manager doesn't always get things
> quite right in that if you choose Restart or Shutdown it very often
> just logs you out and you have to actually select Restart or Shutdown
> again from the login screen.  In reality I think I'd be perfectly
> happy if Quit from xfce4 only allowed me to logout from the session.

Works fine here.  What version of Xfce are you running?  Any messages
to console?  Do you have HAL set up to allow you to shutdown/reboot?
Or if you're not using HAL, have you set up the sudo helper
properly?  (All this stuff is in the docs/FAQ.)  You'll want to file a
bug for this if you've set it up correctly but it doesn't work.  Though
it's probably not Xfce's problem in that case...

	-brian