Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

Adding support for WindowMaker in RedHat 9

I don't like the window managers that come with Gnome or KDE. I typically prefer WindowMaker, a much lighter window manager that I'm using for years now.

To add support for it in RedHat 9, create a /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/WindowMaker file that reads:

#!/bin/sh
exec /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession wmaker

Create the /usr/share/apps/switchdesk/Xclients.wmaker file, if it's not already there. Make sure it points to your wmaker binary location. Since I compiled from source, mine is in /usr/local/bin/wmaker:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/local/bin/wmaker

Make sure these files are executable:

$ chmod a+x /usr/share/apps/switchdesk/Xclients.wmaker
$ chmod a+x /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/WindowMaker

BTW, on a fresh RH9 installation, if you compiled WindowMaker from source, don't forget to put /usr/local/lib in /etc/ld.so.conf, otherwise the shared libraries installed by WindowMaker will not be found. After you've done this, run ldconfig and make sure wmaker --version works fine.