RedHat 7.2 Upgrade: Cleaning Up Gnome Configuration Issues
Dave Aiello wrote, "This is a follow-up to the article I wrote on the RedHat 7.2 upgrade process graphics system problems that I posted in January."
"For several weeks, I have been wondering why both Enlightenment and Sawfish were loading when Gnome was starting up. When I upgraded to RedHat 7.2, I had wanted to switch to Sawfish, because it appeared to be the preferred window manager for Gnome. However, I was having difficulty getting Sawfish to work properly because Enlightenment was loading despite the fact that it was not selected as the window manager. Read on to learn how I solved the problem...."
Dave Aiello continued:
As is the case with everything I do these days, I ended up turning to Google. The key to finding the solution was figuring out the terminology that was used in web pages related to Gnome that could help me solve my problem.
From looking at a number of Gnome-related documents, I determined that a user's desktop manager preference is stored in the session file, generally located at ~/.gnome/session. Once I realized this, I did a Google search for:
Gnome session file
From there, I found a document called Runtime Problems in the Gnome FAQ. This gave me the idea of removing (well, initially renaming) the session file while I was not running Xwindows. In order to do this, I:
- logged out of Gnome
- pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch to text mode
- logged in as myself (not root)
- changed directories to /home/username/.gnome
- renamed session to session.old
- logged out again
- pressed Ctrl-Alt-F7 to switch back to Xwindows mode
- logged in as myself again
When I did this, Gnome loaded its default configuration, and this meant that only Sawfish loaded.
My month and a half working with both Enlightenment and Sawfish loaded simultaneously was frustrating in many small ways. I put off solving the problem to "when I get around to it", and today, I just didn't want to deal with it anymore. Now, I need to really learn how to configure Sawfish properly. If I find this difficult or frustrating, I'll write about it here.