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?
If it comes down to it, is it possible to run gnome without the graphical file manager and a different window manager? Should I just write my own version of nm-applet from scratch?