[wplug] Enlighten me!

[Brandon Kuczenski]

As per the advice of people on this list and elsewhere, I thought I would 
try running a different window manager.  Specifically, I thought I would 
try running 'enlightenment'.  Unfortunately, right now I'm running Gnome 
2.6 and Gnome doesn't seem to want me to switch window managers.

I've done a considerable amount of googling and found that nearly every 
page has a different solution.

First, there is no mention anywhere in the documentation of how to change 
window managers in gnome.  I take this to suggest that they don't want you 
to do it, but this seems somewhat like a violation of trust between the 
gnome developers and their intended userbase.

First, I tried editing my ~/.xsession file so it now reads:

#!/bin/sh
xterm -title "Debian GNU/Linux" -ls -geometry 80x24+70+135 &
#exec gnome-session
exec enlightenment
EOF

That didn't work.  So I tried running gconf-editor from the command line 
and changing /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/current to 
/usr/bin/enlightenment.  I left the default setting as /usr/bin/metacity 
because the online help suggested that 'default' was a misnomer, and what 
it really was was a 'fallback'.  I don't want to nuke my gnome-session, so 
I left that be.

That didn't work.  I tried running "killall metacity && enlightenment &" 
and that actually started enlightenment okay, but it was less than useless 
because nautilus and the gnome-panel didn't know how to interact with 
enlightenment.  I couldn't close any windows that had been open before, 
and I couldn't use the gnome-panel to logout so I ended up with 
ctrl-alt-backspace.

It seems like enlightenment is more like a DE than a WM, but nothing 
indicates that that is formally true.  Furthermore, Enlightenment is 
referred to in more than one place as a "gnome-compliant" window manager. 
Could it be that modern gnome is simply not "enlightenment-compliant"? 
What am I missing?

More importantly, why isn't this a Gnome FAQ?  I've gone through literally 
dozens of google hits, all seemingly with different answers and none of 
them on gnome.org..

Thanks in advance,
Brandon