[desktop-discuss] Gnome save desktop, NOT

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2008, Ghee Teo wrote:

> In the 'launch' menu, preferences->sessions
> click on the Session Options tab,
> Select either one of those option for your session.

I found the Sessions options screen.  It provides options

   o Show splash screen on login
   o Prompt on logout
   o Automatically save changes to session

The first two are checked and the third is not.  However, I 
specifically chose to save the current session (a carefully crafted 
session) at time of logout.  It does start most of the programs, but 
all on the initial workspace rather than the workspaces (I have 10 
workspaces) where they were before.  The startup does not make use of 
the launcher used to originally start the program.  It is pretty 
disconcerting to have 50+ windows pile up on the screen at login since 
it takes quite a while to configure a productive working environment 
again.

CDE (now apparently deprecated) does not have these problems.  It 
preserves original window locations, size, and workspace, and uses the 
original "launcher" (f.exec menu entry in dtwmrc) which started the 
program so that programs get started perfectly on the correct hosts. 
My CDE menu includes options to start programs on other hosts since as 
Sun used to say, "The network is the computer".

Likewise, I have Gnome launchers which arrange to start programs on 
other hosts so if Gnome's session restarter used the launcher rather 
than just remembering the names of the programs running on the 
desktop, then it should be possible for programs to be started on the 
correct hosts.  Instead of getting a terminal program started where it 
was running before, all termals are now running on the local host.

I wrongly assumed that using only Gnome aware programs would help fix 
the startup issue.  So I used gnome-terminal everywhere.  It did not 
help at all.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/