Gnome + XMonad on Karmic Koala

Posted March 20th, 2010 in Linux

I tried inte­grat­ing XMonad using the “rec­om­mended” way of set­ting up a gdm desk­top pro­file to call a cus­tom xmonad.start script which man­u­ally loads Gnome and then starts XMonad. I didn’t get very far. Here’s what finally worked.

  1. sudo apt-get install xmonad
  2. Cre­ate a file /usr/share/xsessions/xsession.desktop with the following 
    [Desktop Entry]
Name=Xsession
Comment=This runs ~/.xsession
Exec=/etc/X11/Xsession

    The file can also go in /etc/X11/sessions/.

  3. Cre­ate a file ~/.xsession with the following 
    export WINDOW_MANAGER="/usr/bin/xmonad"
exec gnome-session
  4. Using gconf-editor or gcon­ftool, change /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager from “metac­ity” to “gnome-wm”. If you don’t do this, Gnome will ignore the WINDOW_MANAGER variable.

I wanted to go with the rec­om­mended way, but the more I looked at it, the more it seemed like I was micro-managing Gnome, and I really didn’t care to do that. I just wanted to have an easy way to use XMonad as a drop-in replace­ment for Metac­ity that was eas­ily reversible. This method should also make it easy to swap out other win­dow man­agers. Now that XMonad is installed, I get to finally play with the con­fig­u­ra­tion settings.

5 Responses to “Gnome + XMonad on Karmic Koala”

  1. Jon said on March 25th, 2010 at 8:04 am:

    Using gconf-editor or gcon­ftool, change /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager from “metac­ity” to “xmonad”. That’s the only step you need :D

  2. Mihai Maruseac said on March 25th, 2010 at 11:33 am:

    Pic­ture or it didn’t happen. :P

    More exactly, please give one or two screen­shots. I want to see if this will pro­vide what I’m look­ing for in a win­dow manager.

  3. Brian said on March 25th, 2010 at 11:52 am:

    A screen­shot of Gnome + Xmonad

    http://jjinux.blogspot.com/2009/11/linux-my-xmonad-setup.html

    Oth­er­wise check out the Xmonad web­site which has some screencasts

    http://xmonad.org/

  4. Mihai Maruseac said on March 25th, 2010 at 12:01 pm:

    Thanks. That link moti­vated me to install xmonad tonight.

  5. Name (required) said on June 3rd, 2010 at 11:14 am:

    /usr/share/xessions/xsession.desktop
    Typo error… “xes­sions” should be replaced by “xsessions”

    Thanks for the post)))