NsCDE from version 1.3 has late beta quality of support for FVWM3. NsCDE is and will
stay compatible for FVWM2 as long as possible. At the time of this writing, FVWM3 was
in it's fourth release and much of the previous problems are solved, altrough it
still has some problems with FvwmPager in multi-monitor setup. Nevertheless, NsCDE will
search for "fvwm3" and then "fvwm2" and "fvwm" in $PATH
. If both, FVWM3
and FVWM2 are installed on the same system, from NsCDE 2.0 and up, FVWM3 has higher
priority. This can be overriden in user's environment (for example
$HOME/.bashrc
) by setting environment variable
FVWM_BIN
with the value which points to name of the FVWM binary, or
full path to the binary if for example, FVWM3 was installed from source in some
non-standard place out of the path.
For example:
export FVWM_BIN=/opt/fvwm3/bin/fvwm3
or ...
export FVWM_BIN=fvwm3
or ...
export FVWM_BIN=fvwm
When running with FVWM3, NsCDE will behave almost identical as in FVWM2, with benefit of RandR support in multiple monitors setup. This allows dynamic addition and removal of physical monitors and better management of such configurations.
Probably the most notable feature of FVWM3 is DesktopConfiguration
.
FVWM3 configuration parameter DesktopConfiguration
decides
of workspaces layout in case of multiple monitors. For now, there are three
options: "global" (default), "per-monitor" and "shared". First option is very similar
in layout to old Xinerama support in FVWM2, while second and third model are splitting
workspaces, so different parts of different workspaces can be shown on different
monitors. NsCDE implements dynamic finding and displaying, as well as creation of
joint backdrops combinations for multiple monitors layout out of the box, so old
hack described in $NSCDE_ROOT/share/doc/nscde/examples/fvwm3-per-monitor/README
is not needed anymore. As in the future more desktop layouts are planned by FVWM3 developers, this
setting has it's GUI control usable on FVWM3 in the
Workspaces and Pages Style Manager. NsCDE
provides InfoStoreAdd desktopconfiguration
directive in
the $FVWM_USERDIR/NsCDE.conf
when FVWM3 is used. This value can be
edited manually to contain "global", "per-monitor" or "shared" value, or Workspaces and Pages
Manager can be used for that task.
Third difference between NsCDE under FVWM2 and FVWM3 is logging. While FVWM2 is logging
all it's actions on X server's standard output and standard error, which usually ended
up in $HOME/.xsession-errors
, FVWM3 logs into default or configured
log file. In NsCDE this file is $FVWM_USERDIR/tmp/fvwm.log
. By
default, FVWM3 does not log anything there if not invoked with "-v" option, but logging
can be toggled by sending SIGUSR2 to FVWM3 process. When
menu item is called, it has one new option on personalized window menu which is called
from the first (left) titlebar button: . When
opening this log window, FVWM3 logging will be enabled almost immediately. To have logging
enabled as soon as possible when FVWM3 is started or restarted, infostore variable
$[infostore.fvwm3_default_logging]
should be set in
$FVWM_USERDIR/NsCDE.conf
.
Caution: using NsCDE under FVWM3 is still a bit of beta quality. Example of the current unsolved FVWM3 bug: Local Pager shown when changing pages and workspaces will contain primary monitor content, which will be wrong on the secondary monitor(s). Any misbehaviour should be carefully distinguished if it is NsCDE or FVWM3 bug while deciding where to report bugs. Watching logs, trying to trigger the same error under FVWM2 will be a good starting point for diagnostic of such problems which may manifest itself.