Using kwin on Gnome

[mrogers]

Thanks to some people's help in the January desktops thread and a lot of digging around on the 'net, I got kwin (KDE's window manager) running in my Gnome desktop, albeit with some quirks. I primarily wanted it because it has so many more options than Metacity, including the option to make just the window borders transparent (a la Vista). However, I ran into a couple issues:

I put "export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/kwin" into ~/.gnomerc as a way to set kwin as default, but Gnome now hangs for well over a minute during the login process at "Window Manager". When it does eventually load, it sometimes works. But sometimes my panels on my secondary monitor are invisible. Also, when I open up a menu (like the main Gnome menu), my cursor turns into the standard X11 "X" cursor while I am hovering over the menu items. Obviously, this last item isn't a big deal, but it's annoying. But the other issues have caused me to revert to Metacity for the time being until I can get them figured out.

I have searched around the internet a LOT and there's almost no info I can find about kwin to work well with Gnome. Maybe I've hit the limits, but if anyone has any ideas on how to fix this stuff, or if you have successfully run kwin inside Gnome, please let me know.

[mrogers]

OK, update: it no longer hangs on X startup; I had kwin starting too early in the sequence. I moved it to 41 as 'kwin --replace' and it just replaces Metacity after Metacity has already loaded and there's no delay.

But I still can't use it, because now whenever the transparency effects are on, my gnome-panel completely disappears. It doesn't matter if I turn all the transparency sliders up to 100% (fully visible), the panel is always invisible whenever the "Use transparency/shadow effects" checkbox is activated. Anyone have any ideas?

[Rob2687]

Did you edit your xorg.conf file? There are certain things you need to add depending on what graphics card you have.

[mrogers]

Yeah, I did. The effects themselves work, that's not the problem. I have transparency, shadows, etc. I just also have an invisible Gnome panel, and I can't find any information about it at all.

[theh0g]

Where did you find how to use Kwin in Gnome? And how did you make it load later, it hangs for me too :(

[mrogers]

I discovered that it wasn't specifically kwin that was making the Gnome loader hang; it's whenever you enable composite effects too early in the loading process. After kwin stopped working, I went back to Metacity and tried out xcompmgr. It worked great, and so I set it up to load at Gnome startup and then it still hanged. I haven't solved that problem yet except I made a script that I can click on after Gnome is fully loaded to activate the composite effects.

If you want to use kwin, just install it and then run "kwin --replace" from a console.

[tronica]

just open the sessions manger(Desktop->Pref->More->sessions and add kwin --replace

[Ethere]

I'm having issues myself. It appears that everything is working on boot up. Shadows are there, etc. Only issue is when I load any apps, firefox, anything, it's all distorted, and won't work right. It's barely readable. I have to disable shadows/translucency in kcontrol to get it to look normal again. I have an ATI Radeon 9500 Pro. I heard it only works well with nvidia cards.

[chavo]

Can't you guys just run KDE's composite manager from within gnome. I remember it working for me. I can't test it right now though I'm booted into Windows.

Just run kompmgr from the command line.

Edit....

Just tried it out. kompmgr by itself will not make metacity borders transparent. It will add shadows though. Gotta get out of gnome now!

Edited January 21, 2006 by chavo

[Rob2687]

kompmgr is still better than xcompmgr though... much faster even if it is just for shadows.