There are several ubuntu applications that, when I run them, seem to at least partially destroy my Fvwm environment. I’ve encountered this with quite a number of ubuntu commands, all of which display a directory in icon format. The example that’s currently causing me trouble is shotwell.
shotwell *.jpg
Then select File-> View in File manager
This replaces my fvwm desktop with a gnome-like screen full of jpg icons, which is great for viewing pictures, but then when I exit shotwell, I’ve lost all my Fvwm functionality:
- fvwm menus accessible by left and right mouse clicks are gone, so for example, I can no longer access FvwmModule
- the desktop now displays my home directory, in icon format.
On the other hand, I still have my taskbar and the xterms that I created on fvwm startup still function somewhat, but not entirely, the way they would under fvwm.
Is there any way that I can prevent this hijacking, while still having access to the problem ubuntu applications, i.e., way that once I’ve exited the problem applications, I’m back with full fvwm functionality? Currently I have to exit fvwm entirely and start over.
Hmm, very strange behaviour … On Debian this doesn’t happen. I’ve installed shotwell, open a terminal, cd into a image directory with jpegs and run shotwell *.jpg Shotwell pops up with the jpegs found in the directory. After selecting File-> View in File manager Thunar was started with the image directory. But that’s all …
For me it sounds like a what ever application catches your desktop. PcmanFm has the ability to do that. What you can try is to run top in a terminal and look which application occurs after starting shotwell/file manager.
Thanks for this advice! After closing shotwell, I found that nautilus was still running. I killed the nautilus job, and got all my fvwm functionality back, except that my desktop background was still the ubuntu display, Forbidden City. I recovered my original background with
FvwmCommand "Exec xsetroot -solid DarkBlue"
and was back to where I started.
Certainly odd that these two manual steps were necessary, though
