On Tue, 2003-01-21 at 22:39, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
On Tuesday 21 January 2003 16:17, Matt Stamm wrote:
With all the opinions on desktop environments, it begs the question (at least from a beginner like myself!), how easy is it to switch desktops, and can it be done on the fly? Can you run them at the same time?
This question also interests me.
I know that I can exit to kdm (or gdm if I'm running that...) and select any of the other Desktop managers or Window Managers that I previously installed, but this raises questions about what is being loaded.
If I load Enlightenment or Ice or fvwm2 (etc.) from kdm, am I also running a bunch of KDE structure that would NOT be present if I were to boot into xdm and start the same window manglers from there??
No
Similarly, what's supposed to happen if I boot into xdm and start (say...) Blackbox, and then launch KMail? And, what about when I quit KMail... is there a lot of K stuff still loaded/active?
Yes At least for a while. The kde daemons will die when the last client has exited, but there is a timeout before that happens.
Is there a difference in what's loaded/running if I invoke Ice from kdm, versus from gdm?
That depends on how it's set up. The *fact* of kdm or gdm won't make a difference, but they are different programs with different configurations. They will load what they are told.
What about if GNOME is running when I launch Ice?
I wonder if it's possible to "run" Gnome without a window manager. I don't think so. And you can't run two window managers at the same time. Having said that, it's a part of the documentation of garnome that to switch from sawfish to the new metacity you should killall sawfish; sleep 1; metacity & I guess something similar could be done to swap in icewm.
Does some GNOME stuff shut down? or is it all still there behind the Ice curtain?
The curtain would be held by Gnome in this case. Ice would sit quietly in the background and maybe draw a window title bar or two. There is a big difference between Desktop Environments and window managers. Check out http://freedesktop.org for a brief description.
Finally, what about starting GNOME from kdm or KDE from gdm?
No problems.
Silly? Possible problems? Any difference from using xdm?
Yes, in xdm you can't really select anything. You have to edit config files manually. That's why kdm, gdm, wdm, elogind etc etc etc were written.
I assume that the major desktops are best started from their respective managers, but what's the functional difference?
None.
Their respective environments will have config tools for them, so it
might be a good idea to have them installed, but apart from that there's
nothing tying kdm to kde. Look'n'feel on the login screen and config
tools, that's all.
--
Anders Johansson