Repalcing The Window Manager In Xfce

[Pleng]

Somebody once wrote a tutorial on how to change the window manager to MatchBox when using minimenu. I'd like to be able to do much the same thing with XFCE, so all the apps run full screen without any window decorations.

Is there any way to do this?

cheers

 

[Pleng]

OK So I've installed MatchBox WM by using the instructions found here.

I can force matchbox to run by typing:

killall xfce && matchbox-window-manager -use_titlebar no


This works fine aside from two small problems (other than having to run the command manually, of course!):

1 - I always have a dead terminal running (if I add an & at the end of the line, matchbox doesn't start)
2 - The task list on the side panel (depicted by a small arrow by default) doesn't show the list of active windows - presumably it's expecting to interface directly with xfwm4

Does anybody know how to get around these issues? And also how to make MatchBox WM automatically load on XFCE startup?

 

[Pleng]

2 - The task list on the side panel (depicted by a small arrow by default) doesn't show the list of active windows - presumably it's expecting to interface directly with xfwm4

I got around this one by installing the gpe-taskmanager package and creating a launcher for it. It's a shame that it is so small and of a fixed size, but it's a working solution for now

 

[WizardStan]

Evil Dragon tells all on how to add new window managers to the "Switch gui" list so you don't have to worry about dead terminals
That may also solve the task list problem, dunno. Give it a try and see where it leads.

 

[Pleng]

unfortunately the repositories for some reason dont have the matchbox-panel package so I cant change straight to matchbox. I need therefore to kill xfwm4 and replace it with matchbox-window-manager after xfce has loaded. Ideally id be able to specify which window manager xfce loads by default but Im not sure this is possible.

 

[WizardStan]

That's because the panel is system specific. You may be able to get away with using the BeagleBoard version.

 

[Pleng]

I get the following error when trying to install that: 'Packages for matchbox-panel found but incompatible with the architecture configured ... opkg)install_cmd: cannot install package matchbox-panel