Tips for using the window system

Starting a console window

xterm -C &

Alt-Ctl characters

To immediately exit the window system (no second chances here - so careful): ctl-alt-backspace

• ctl-alt-F1 through ctl-alt-F6: whole screen turns into a big virtual console
• ctl-alt-F7: Get back to X windows

Make the ESCAPE key paste

keycode 9 = Escape Insert

To make it take effective immediately (but not after you log out), you can type:

xmodmap -e 'keycode 9 = Escape Insert'

Helpful X commands

Or for a brute force method of telling the X window system to turn off the screen saver:

xset s off

Interesting X commands:

• xwininfo (to get inforomation about a window you point to)
• xlsclients (list the X programs running)
• resize (to find out the size of a window)

Offsets must be given as pairs; in other words, in order to specify either XOFF or YOFF both must be present. Windows can be placed in the four corners of the screen using the following specifications:

       +0+0    upper left hand corner

       -0+0    upper right hand corner

       -0-0    lower right hand corner

       +0-0    lower left hand corner

How to change your window manager

The default window manager for GNOME is metacity, which is very popular.

Another window manager available on Red Hat Linux is sawfish.

There are a number of ways to change your window manager from metacity to sawfish.

• One method:

              Start-->Preferences-->Control Center
                  More Preferences
                      Sessions
                          Session options:
                              X Automatically save changes on session
                          Current Session:
                              Remove metacity
  
                              Add sawfish and change it from
                              Normal to Restart (one of the upper
                              middle buttons)
  

  
  Then logout and log back in: the sawfish window manager should be up when you log back in.
• Alternatively, here is a a brute-force method for changing your window system from metacity to sawfish:

  killall metacity; sleep 5; sawfish &
  

• Still another method: Set your WINDOW_MANAGER environment variable inside .bashrc to sawfish:

  WINDOW_MANGER=sawfish
  

  Logout and log back in.
• Or use a really brute-force method for you shell programmers out there: Change line 46 of /usr/bin/gnome-wm

Where to get more information