There has been an issue brewing for a while in the fancy X desktops, specifically Gnome, but I beleive KDE has the same problem.
Gnome wants to make a lock file based in the user's home directory. This is problematic if the home directory is NFS mounted, as the lock then is expected to be manged using statd and/or lockd. The history of statd/lockd has been at best chequered; not just in the Linux community but in general. The stated "workaround" is to ensure that the same version/release of statd/lockd are present on both client and server. This is silly and ineffective in cases where the network is not homogenous with respect to OS (this is something the Open Source community is in general good at!). We are a university running a network with machines from many vendors, so it is completely infeasible to expect homogeneity. I would expect that any reasonable workplace will have similar issues. Up until RedHat 7.3 it was possible to get Gnome going and ignore an error raised by gconf; with RedHat 8.0 it appears as though Gnome will now refuse to layout the desktop unless it can successfully make a lock. This makes Gnome completely non-operational. Is there a way for either desktop to disable this "feature", and cause the locks to either not be generated, or be placed in a different location (perhaps a user-specific dir in /tmp or /var/tmp, which is what the CORBA clients do)? Is this possible for either KDE/Gnome? Does anyone know what the other window managers do? Using "twm" works fine of course, as it does not create any goofy configuration or lock files. I would expect that being forced to use twm will cause unhappiness among the student user base. Is there is a window manager that students are likely to find easier to use than twm, yet doesn't have lock-file dependencies? Thanks for any suggestions, Andrew. -- Andrew Hamilton-Wright Systems Analyst, Computing and Information Science +1 519 824 4120 x52969 -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
