On 2015-05-13, Robert Heller heller@deepsoft.com wrote:
I have a strange problem and I know I am doing things way outside of the box.
First of all I don't like Gnome or really any of the mess-windows flavored desktop systems and no, I don't like the MacOSX flavored desktop systems (like Ubuntu's Unity) either. The 'desktop' system (if you could have called it that) that I learned on was DEC's 'DecWindows' system on a VAXStation 2000 (under VMS). This was basically a rebranded Motif system with MWM and used DEC's *simple* session manager. I presently use FVWM in MWM compatibilty mode and a home written session manager written in Tcl/Tk. I use FVWM's icon box module to manage the run-time icons for running applications. I don't have *any* desktop icons and don't (won't) use a graphical file manager. The session manager has a simple customizable menu and a text area (for note taking and as an output space for launched programs).
I do use a gnome-panel and use nm-applet to manage networking on my laptop. This works just fine on my older laptop (a Thinkpad X31) running CentOS 5. I recently got a newer laptop (a used Thinkpad R500) that I installed CentOS 6 on and set up up much the same. But there is a problem with nm-applet: it works for the *wired* network, but not for the wireless. I *know* that the wireless NIC is detected and working, since if I fire up the default GNome desktop it works. It just does not work with my alternitive setup. When I click on the nm-applet little icon, it does list all of the available wireless networks, but when I select one, *nothing* happens.
I'm guessing I am missing some GNome infrastructure, but I don't know what. I am running the gnome settings daemon and I am using dbus-launch to start the dbus system. But what else am I missing? Where should I be looking for possible error messages? Is there some flag I can give nm-applet to get debugging information? Is there an alternitive applet available?
I'd say it's related to policykit. Is the process /usr/libexec/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 running in your session? It's launched by gnome-session, i.e., when running the full GNOME desktop.
An alternative applet is available in the form of wicd, from the EPEL repository.
If it comes down to it, is it possible to run gnome without the graphical file manager and a different window manager?
You can in the case of the window manager, at least. Using gconf-editor, See the gconf keys under /desktop/gnome/session/required_components. You can change the windowmanager key to a value of your choice. Also, you might try leaving the value of the filemanager key blank. I don't know whether that will result in no file manager being launched, or whether it will revert to the default. Maybe the value /bin/true will achieve the desired effect?
As a last resort, you could just tell nautilus not to draw desktop icons. Once you start gnome-panel, then you've loaded the GNOME libraries, GTK libraries, GLib, bonobo, etc., etc. Running nautilus in the background will involve little additional overhead.
Should I just write my own version of nm-applet from scratch?
Hopefully it won't come to that!