Arch Linux

itti

Member

Registered: 2007-06-01

Posts: 79

are there any active users of awesome on gnome?

Hi,

I'm a long time awesome user but recently had to switch to Gnome on my notebook because of some work at a client that requires me to switch proxies etc. I noticed that my hardware keys for volume/brightness etc. work much more smooth then they did in the past in a pure awesome setup. So naturally I thought it would be a good idea to switch to a Gnome/awesome hybrid setup.

As stated in the Arch wiki there is supposed to be a way to pull this off described in the awesome wiki here.

I did all those changes but when I try to run this session "Awesome Gnome" through GDM I'm just forwarded to a Gnome error message  that states "Ooops there seems to have been a Problem [Log Out]". I checked the journal thoroughly but I can't find an error message in there. It just looks like using awesome as a window manager in Gnome may not be supported anymore.

So my question is: Are there any Arch users out there that use a similar setup? I read that we supposedly had a "gnome-awesome" package in AUR but it seems to have disappeared. Instead I saw a "awesome-cinnamon" package which would also work, I guess but I don't really need anything from those WMs apart from their flawless integration of Networkmanager, proxy configuration and multimedia keys.

Cheers,
- Itti

Last edited by itti (2016-02-09 09:54:26)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 9,003

Website

Re: are there any active users of awesome on gnome?

AFAIUI, using Awesome with GNOME 3.18 is no longer possible, the GNOME developers have clamped down on that perversion of their UI (see https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/ for more on this).

The link to the Awesome Wiki guide is for GNOME 3.9 which is quite a long time ago.

I know it won't work with xmonad unless you use GNOME Flashback [1] -- have you tried that?

[1] See the note here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xm … and_xmonad

---

Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

itti

Member

Registered: 2007-06-01

Posts: 79

Re: are there any active users of awesome on gnome?

Hi,

thanks for the pointer to gnome flashback. I tried with that but landed on the same error message. After checking the various .desktop files that I created I noticed that my gnome session was named differently then what I had GDM pass to "gnome-session --session". After fixing that I was able to invoke awesome alright. Sadly it looks like a lot of the helpful functionality of gnome seems to be baked into gnome-shell itself. Without that all I have is basically a strangely invoked awesome instance which I'm also unable to shut down properly.

I will try with having gnome-shell running in parallel or maybe metacity (gnome flashback) but I'm lacking the time at the moment to test this out. I will update this thread with my findings.

-edit: Still couldn't find the time for an extensive test but from what I could see gnome 3 doesn't support this mode of operation anymore. A lot of the functionality that I wanted to use seems to be part of gnome-shell itself now.

Last edited by itti (2016-02-15 10:16:00)