Motif Window Manager (MWM) without GNOME

[dgustavsson]

Hello, new to the group so I'm sorry if not all the info is here on my first shot.

Some history...On CentOS 5.X, we used MWM to manage the display with a blank black background a customized menu via ~/.mwmrc. We then started our own software on top of that (a simple GUI in the center). This was all done with a ~/.Xclients file.

Fast forward to CentOS 7.3 and I am having trouble with the MWM. I am using a modified version of our original ~/.Xclients file and I have created a custom session in /usr/share/xsessions called mwm.desktop. The relevant code is below.

My issue. As far as I can tell, mwm is running (checked with ps) and I can see my right-click menu, but the background is the gray background of the login screen and none of the windows will refresh. If I right-click, I see the menu, but then it never disappears nor can I interact with it after I release the right-click. When checking ps, I did note that /usr/sbin/gdm is running, but if I try and kill it, it kicks me back to the login screen. If I start from run level 3 and use "xinit -e /usr/bin/mwm", I get the expected results from MWM (minus my own application running), but going to runlevel 3 and starting this is not an good solution.

Something else I have noticed. If I do a pkill on the process "Xorg", it logs me out and when I log back in, I get exactly what I am looking for. A black background with my app in the middle and the menus work as expected too.

Can anyone provide any help on what I am missing?

As a note. I know this can work as I had it setup on a machine on Friday. Thinking that I had noted all the changes so I could automate a setup script, I stupidly reconfigured that machine from scratch. I obviously missed something.


/usr/share/xsessions/mwm.desktop

Code: Select all

[Desktop Entry]
Name=MWM
Comment=This session logs you into the Motif Window Manager
Exec=exec $HOME/.Xclients
TryExec=mwm
Icon=
DesktopNames=MWM;MWM

~/.Xclients

Code: Select all

/usr/bin/mwm -multiscreen &
/path/to/my/application

Thank you in advance!!!

EDIT: I answered my own question. I just needed to run startx in the xsession file instead of $HOME/.Xclients. The proper mwm.desktop file should look like the file below. After this both MWM and my application started up properly.

/usr/share/xsessions/mwm.desktop

Code: Select all

[Desktop Entry]
Name=MWM
Comment=This session logs you into the Motif Window Manager
Exec=startx
TryExec=mwm
Icon=
DesktopNames=MWM;MWM