[ILUG] switchdesk

[Conor Wynne]

Hi all,

After much procrastinating, I decided to get an old thinkpad rather than
a new netbook.
I need a 12inch display, which ruled out a netbook, and I just don't
like larger displays as it defeats the purpose of a portable computer -
entirely personal choice I know, but I know what I like!

So I now have a great little laptop, IBM thinkpad X31. Only 512M
installed, so would like to get rid of gnome (but just for myself, the
wife likes it) and use another, say XFCE4 or something else.
Suggestions welcomed on this front.

Anyway, installed XFce4 via yum groupinstall, and switchdesk'd it to
XFCE, which thinks it has been successful.

[conor at mammabear ~]$ cat .Xclients
#! /bin/bash

# Created by Red Hat Desktop Switcher

if [ -e "$HOME/.Xclients-$HOSTNAME$DISPLAY" ]; then
    exec $HOME/.Xclients-$HOSTNAME$DISPLAY
else
    exec $HOME/.Xclients-default
fi

[conor at mammabear ~]$ cat .Xclients-default
#! /bin/bash
# (c) 2000-2004 Red Hat, Inc.

WM="startxfce4"
WMPATH="/usr/bin /usr/X11R6/bin /usr/local/bin"

for p in $WMPATH ; do
    [ -x $p/$WM ] && exec $p/$WM
done

exit 1

Yet when I login I get gnome again.
What have I done wrong?

p.s.: I've tuned the VM as follows, which seems to be working well:

[root at mammabear ~]# sysctl -p
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 0
net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 1
net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_source_route = 0
kernel.sysrq = 0
kernel.core_uses_pid = 1
vm.swappiness = 20
vm.laptop_mode = 1

Bizzarely, "sysctl -w $option" does not write the config... a bug?

For those with thinkpads, suspend works, but resume does not! - unless
you add this kernel boot option : "nomodeset", after a reboot it is
flawless.

The sound also works fine -- but not via alsaconf, rather in the gnome
menu properties thingy. I forget now, but it does work.. :-)

Now fix my switchdesk :-)

Cheers
Conor.