I recently discovered that ctwm is once again a standard package in Fedora, both
32bit and 64 bit -- when I upgraded to fedora 18 I had no trouble installing and
using it, whereas in the past I had to fetch and compile the sources.
I would like to thank whoever is responsible. Although I tried openbox for a
while
and found I could live with it, I still much prefer the tailorability and
behaviour
of ctwm.
(I don't use gnome or kde: I start from the lightweight fedora lxde CD for a
minimal
installation, then add things I need from repositories, including many things
that were installed to meet dependency requirements.)
I have a question for this list: apologies if there's a standard well known
answer.
I now very rarely reboot either my desktop PC or my laptop, since pm-hibernate
works
very well. (In fact in fedora 18 both hibernate and suspend seem to work,
whereas
in the past I could not get linux to resume reliably from suspend.)
But now and again there's an upgrade that makes a reboot desirable. Is there
any way
of saving the state of CTWM windows so that they can be restored after a reboot?
I use my ten CTWM desktops as extensions to my brain, keeping track of many
part-read
and part-written documents and things to be done. So having to restart CTWM can
require me to carefully compile a list by hand, except for firefox tabs and
windows
which are now managed inside firefox.
What I don't know is whether the information ctwm uses to restore the display
as I
move between virtual desktops could somehow be made available across runs of
ctwm
also?
I suspect doing this in general would be very difficult, especially for things
launched not from CTWM menus or functions but e.g. from xterm windows or other
things.
I have never worked on a window manager myself -- I am merely a grateful user.
It may be that the way I launch ctwm is incompatible with this functionality. I
don't
start my linux machine in graphical mode: I use '3' in the grub.cfg menu to
boot in
multi-user non-graphical mode, which is often most convenient for any
maintenance
work. I then enter graphical mode by running startx which invokes ~/.xinitrc,
which
sets up some xterm windows and a few other things (e.g. swap ctrl/caps lock,
swap
esc/grave keys, start pulseaudio) and then runs ctwm
ctwm -W &
followed by an exit button which keeps X11 running and allows me to restart CTWM
without restarting X, though I have not needed to do that for many months.
I recently had some problems on my laptop that led me to do this, without
understanding why:
dbus-launch --exit-with-session ctwm &
I think it helped with networking, though linux has now got so complex (e.g.
with
systemd, and the horrendous and buggy grub2, that I often don't know what I am
doing
when I follow suggestions).
The ctwm man page assumes users know what session managers do! I have the
gnome-session-manager which must have been installed by something I needed. Can
ctwm
use the session manager to restore a session after reboot?
I believe open-box can do that, but I would not switch from ctwm to openbox
merely
for that purpose.
Thanks.
Aaron
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
