Re: nautilus

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 05:12:32PM -0400 or thereabouts, Peter Leftwich wrote:
> On 18 Sep 2002, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> > On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 21:33, Peter Leftwich wrote:
> > > I am trying to run Gnome 2.0 and before running startx I `setenv
> > > WINDOW_MANAGER metacity` (tcsh).
...
Since this went to the freebsd list as well, I presume this is from
ports or something?

> I guess my question then is... once I have a session completely laid out to
> my liking, is there a simple way to create a backup of the file(s)?  Maybe
> from ~/.gnome2/ someplace?  Is there a way to construct or reconstruct my
> ~/.xinitrc based on a "session" that I like?

I have a gnome-session-save command in /usr/bin/ which was provided
by gnome-session. In Gnome 1.4 this used to be save-session, but
we seem to have renamed a pile of commands for 2.0. 

Run that. 

> Similar question about this -- my ~/.xinitrc has a line that says "exec
> gnome-session."  Is there another DIFFERENT command line I can use here
> such as something like just "gnome &" instead of gnome-session?

gnome-session is it, really.
I believe some people who don't want the whole of Gnome may try
putting in 'gnome-panel &'. I haven't tried this myself.

> > > It seems I keep getting layers and layers of desktops and the 
> > > "taskbar" at the bottom of the window gets obfuscated.  When 
> > > startx is done, I can right click and choose "New Terminal" but 
> > > the usual borders of [_] and [X] and [-] etc are missing, cropped 
> > > away.  When I run "top" and kill nautilus things come back.
> >
> > This I have never seen.  Perhaps it's related to your environment

Given "the usual borders of... are missing", I wonder whether there
is no window manager running. Are the titlebars of windows missing
too? (The "taskbar" is the panel, btw.) 

> > setting in .xinitrc.  Perhaps a screen shot would help visualize what
> > you're seeing.
> 
> I have been seeing it quite frequently lately - I'll make a screenshot 
> at somepoint (or try to, since my MainMenu button disappears and with 
> it the "Take a Screen shot..." command in the "start menu") and post 
> the URL to view it.  Great idea, thanks.

If you have ImageMagick on the machine, you can take a screenshot
through the command 'import' in a terminal window: the man page for 
this says you would do "import -windw root filename.jpeg" (to get 
the whole root window and put it in a JPG format file).

> How do I find out what the items in my "Start Menu" have for their 
> cmd lines?

I'd swear there used to be a right-click option on menus to get
the commands they run. Hmm. The laborious way would be right-click,
say 'add launcher to panel', then right-click on the resulting 
launcher and look at the properties. The command line way is
to look for the .desktop files in (probably) /usr/share/something.
(If BSD puts them somewhere else, you're going to have to run a
find for something like gnome-terminal.desktop and then look in
that directory for the rest.)

> > > Is nautilus part of Gnome 2.0 or part of metacity?!
> > 
> > Nautilus is a component of GNOME.  It _is_ the GNOME 2 
> > desktop.  It is responsible for drawing the icons for Home, 
> > Start Here, Trash, etc. Metacity is simply a window manager; 
> > like twm, afterstep, blackbox, etc.  It is responsible for 
> > drawing the window decorations (title bars, window handles, etc.).
> 
> Ah ha, I don't really like this in that case... It seems like 
> there is a "Microsoft Active Desktop" aspect of Gnome 2 in that 

I do not know what an active desktop is. I would mildly disagree
that "Nautilus _is_ the Gnome 2 desktop". I don't use a file manager
and I fancy that I am running Gnome 2 :) I just turned Nautilus
off, because I don't need little pictures on my root window 
either. 

> case.  It must not help that I do things in gnome-terminal such 
> as `rm -rf .Trash` or `rm -rf ~/.gnome-desktop/Trash` just 
> because I am anti-trash.
> 
> Also, a related question - are file managers related to the GUI 
> (kde, gnome etc), the windows manager (metacity, sawfish, fvwm95, 
> fvwm etc) or just third party apps that can be MIME-linked?  I 
> would really like to find one that is most like Windows Explorer 
> (on the left hand insert) and like ACDSee32 on the right-hand icon 
> area :)  :)   (:

File managers vary a lot. Gnome and KDE each have file managers
which were designed to look and behave like the rest of their
respective desktops. There are others out there designed to 
look and behave differently. An example is the ROX-Filer, whose
drag and drop behaviour owes a lot to -- oh, dear, I forget
now, but I believe it's RiscOS. You can run that within Gnome
as far as I know. It has a lot of fans. 

I haven't used Windows so I don't know what the behaviour of 
Explorer or this other thing is.

I have edited the subject line somewhat, because subjects
about "foo sux" tend to get deleted by people who think it's
just going to be flames. I nearly deleted it myself. If you
are looking for answers, this isn't what you will want. 

Telsa