[Xmonad] How to combine xmonad with Ubuntu?

[Andy Gimblett]

On Sat, Sep 08, 2007 at 12:37:11AM +0200, Kai Grossjohann wrote:
> Are any Ubuntu users here?  I just got a new box with Ubuntu on it, and
> I wonder how to best combine xmonad with Ubuntu.  Ubuntu seems to have a
> lot of useful functionality built into the graphical environment, such
> as checking for updates, checking for the network one is in, and perhaps
> other things.
> 
> I guess if I go my old route of replacing all of Gnome with my custom
> ~/.xinitrc script, then I'll lose that stuff.
> 
> Suggestions?

I use Ubuntu with xmonad under xdm, but I don't use any of the
graphical config stuff personally.  However, all those apps are still
available of course - you just need to find out their names then you
can call them from the shell or dmenu or whatever.  For example, IIRC,
network-admin is the name of the network setup control thing.  So
maybe just look at the shortcuts and find out the names of the stuff
you want to use.

Oh, on second thoughts, I might be misleading you here, because I
never used classic Ubuntu: I used Xubuntu instead, which comes with
xfce instead of gnome.  I did that specifically because I knew I'd
strip it back and didn't want the overhead of gnome.  So maybe
network-admin is a Xubuntu specific thing; I don't know.

Hmmm, thinking on, I seem to recall seeing a screenshot of xmonad with
a KDE kicker at the bottom, around the time status bars started
happening...  Ah, here we are: looks like Spencer's the expert here.

    http://xmonad.org/images/screen-sjanssen-kde-kicker.png

(on http://xmonad.org/contrib.html)

Maybe you can do something similar with whatever app Gnome uses to
display its menu/status?  (Or maybe it's an intractable mess of
interconnected bloat - I really don't know. :-) )

HTH,

-Andy

-- 
Andy Gimblett
Computer Science Department
University of Wales Swansea
http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~csandy/