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Getting Rid of GNOME and/or KDE under RedHat LINUX

Maybe there are more people who love to have a 1600x1200 resolution on their computers and DO NOT want to have a Windows-look-alike window manager?

Ever since RedHat 6.0 the upgrade/installation will automatically install either the new Desktop Environments "GNOME" and/or "KDE" on your system.. Which is very nice if you like your desktop to be cluttered and/or you don't like to make full use of your screen real estate. ;-)

Fvwm or Fvwm2 are much better suited to make maximum use of your valuable screen real estate.. and they give you as many virtual screens as you like. And user-configurable drop down menues when you click on the screen background, so you can start all your favourite programs, but without the annoying Windows menu bar.

The new RedHat versions use gdm instead of xdm to do the login session.. see /etc/X11/gdm .. Unfortunately there are no hints whatsoever in the Gnome and/or KDE documentation telling you how to get rid of these annoying window managers.

Desperately looking through the configuration files, I found two ways to force gdm to use the window manager of my choice.. ..resistance is futile!!

Fvwm Resource File

Here's my .fvwmrc file -- just copy it and rename it to ~/.fvwmrc. If you want to make it the default .fvwmrc file for all users on your machine, then copy it to: /etc/X11/fvwm/system.fvwmrc

Method 1 to disable Gnome/KDE

To make fvwm (or any other window manager) your default, do the following 
   # cat > ~/.xinitrc
   fvwm
   CTRL-D
   #
In other words, you just put 'fvwm' in your ~/.xinitrc file -- for root in has to be under /root of course.

Method 2 to disable Gnome/KDE

Sometimes the simple method above doesn't seem to work, and I didn't want to reverse-engineer the gdm/Gnome setup, so I just quickly hacked this: (and it works..!) 
   > cat > ~/.Xclients
   # force file ~/.Xclients to tell gdm which window manager to start..
   #
   # PLEASE don't give me gnome/kde - but rather start fvwm 

    if [ -f /usr/X11R6/bin/fvwm ]; then
        exec fvwm
    else
        exec twm
    fi
   > chmod u+x  ~/.Xclients
Don't forget to make ~/.Xclients executable, or it won't work!!

And don't forget to clean up.. he he! 

   > cd ~
   > rm -rf .gnome* enlightenment*
   >

Newer Versions of Fvwm work with GNOME / KDE

Back in 2000, when I original wrote this page, it was not possible to use Fvwm with GNOME or KDE.

Apparently newer versions of Fvwm ( >2.4.x ) support GNOME desktop hints and it is supposedly possible to integrate them with GNOME and KDE. I haven't tried this - but I wanted to mention this and give some pointers to the Fvwm home page and the EWmh home page, in case somebody is interested in using Fvwm together with GNOME or KDE.

See also: My .fvwm2rc file

See also: An older .fvwmrc file of mine

See also: Screenshot of my 1600x1200 center monitor with Fvwm

See also: Howto set-up multiple monitors under LINUX / XFree / RedHat

See also: My XF86Config file for multiple monitors

Back to the UNIX tips

Hope this helps somebody..

Maintainer: Tilo Sloboda linux AT unixgods.org
last update: $Revision: 1.4 $ / $Date: 2004/05/20 20:54:28 $