[NBLUG/talk] Disabling the window manager in KDE?

Phillip Fynan pfynan at gmail.com
Wed Jun 11 09:33:01 PDT 2008


On Monday June 9 2008 20:35:52 Lincoln Peters wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 4:48 PM, Phillip Fynan <pfynan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > How are you starting KDE, and how did you disable the stuff you didn't
> > want? The window manager is started by the shell script "startkde", but
> > there are multiple ways to disable it.
>
> The Windows PC is using Hummingbird Exceed as a an X11 server; I think
> it's using the window manager provided by Windows.  The $DISPLAY
> variable on the Linux server is initialized to the hostname of my
> Windows machine at startup.  To start KDE, I opened an SSH session
> with PuTTY with the Linux server, and typed in "startkde" at the
> command line.
>
> I was able to use the KDE Control Center to disable the KDE desktop
> and screensaver, and to reposition the panel so it didn't overlap with
> the Windows taskbar.  However, I couldn't find any way to change or
> disable the window manager, and a quick look through the files in my
> ~/.kde folder didn't turn up any leads for changing or disabling the
> window manager.

The window manager is started by startkde, which starts ksmserver, which 
starts the window manager. You can tell startkde you want a different window 
manager by setting the KDEWM environment variable, but this probably won't 
work for you (I mean, maybe you could set it to /bin/cat or something). 
However, according to ksmserver, it won't start a window manager if one is 
already running. So you may not actually have to do anything.

Let me know if this works, or if drastic measures are required.




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