[GUIDE] Use KWIN with GNOME

nabeelimran · 2012-04-01 13:56:54

Hello!
I installed KDE on my [TEST] partition last night and gave it an 'honest' spin and I was impressed by it. I have been a die-hard kind of GNOME guy uptil now but ...
Anyways, since most of the things I liked about KDE were related to KWIN I thought about trying it in my [MAIN] GNOME setup. So I did some googling and then went through with it. I must say I did manage to do what I wanted to so I thought about sharing it with the community. My [MAIN] working install is GNOME 3 with 'Force Fallback' enabled, or GNOME Classic as some call it. Please note that your mileage may vary so don't be disappointed if it doesn't work out the way you want it to.
Here are the steps I took:

1. mounted my [TEST] partition to /media/
2. ran 'sudo pacman -S kdebase-workspace --cachedir /media/[TEST]/var/cache/pacman/pkg' ...#since I had done a fresh install just last night, this saved me about a 100MB of download :-)
3. ran Alt+F2 and 'kwin --replace' just to try it out
4. tried putting 'export WINDOW_MANAGER=kwin' in '~/.profile' but it didn't work ...#i was trying to find a way to use kwin at startup instead of metacity
5. tried creating the key '/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager=/usr/bin/kwin' in gconf-editor but that didn't work either
6. then i thought of something very simple! I installed fusion-icon and put it in startup using gnome-session-properties and then I just had to select the Window Manager as kwin only once. Now fusion-icon automatically loads kwin at log-in. I know it isn't the most elegant way but it works!
7. well almost everything worked with that except the workspaces. The gnome-pager-plugin would only give me one workspace with no option to increase the number of workspaces. I had to logout, log back in using 'KDE Plasma Desktop' session from GDM, logout again and when i logged into GNOME session there was a 'KDE System Settings' menu entry in 'Applications > Other'. Using KDE System Settings > Workspace Behaviour > Virtual Desktops the number of desktops can be changed very conveniently.

Well thats about it. Kwin's composting is really nice in GNOME and I have found a cool Window Decorator called 'deKorator' with many nice themes. Do give it a try and let me know how it goes

Arch Linux

#1 2012-04-01 13:56:54

[GUIDE] Use KWIN with GNOME

Board footer