On 2015-05-13, Robert Heller <heller at 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! -- Liam