But at least the ~/.gnomerc-thingy works on the laptop (as I understand it, this works by calling on the default Gnome setting “/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager” ["gnome-wm"] which in turn runs whatever window manager is given in the environment variable $WINDOW_MANAGER).

It’s odd that it doesn’t work on the desktop though. (Even though I have upgraded them both to the exact same versions of *everything* in the system.) Sigh. :(

Did you have any “focusing” issues with stumpwm under Karmic? I got it to start (checked with “ps” in a terminal at the console) but without being able to the keyboard at all under X — expecting to see my ratpointer to turn into a little box on pressing my prefix key, but when I did that nothing happened. However this went away when I started up a terminal from my ~/.stumpwmrc.

I got the gnome-panel to work by simply pkill:ing it. Gnome-session (I assume) then automatically restarts it, making everything look and work okay (I assume gnome-panel must be started after stumpwm for stumpwm to detect it properly.. But I’m not sure. Are you employing any workarounds for this?)

Oh, BTW, which lisp dialect do you use with stump? clisp?

P.S. O.T. I was sort of startled when I found your page by the mentioning of rydis at the top of the page. I’ve met him a couple of times, and I’m a friends of Ante and Åka who knew him really well. I’ve been told that I look quite like him. (There’s even a witness reporting rydis presence in Uppsala after his disappearance — I remember Åka telling me at the time that she was pretty certain this witness had actually seen me..)

That usually does the trick, but the easier way is to change window manager is by editing the registry, either using gconf-editor or gconftool-2. I’ve updated the post with the command to use. Hope that works!

Is there some guide on how to get stumpwm up and running under Karmic?

Using the trick described here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=577660#postmenu_3960750 works fine when logging in the first time with stumpwm, but any subsequent logins result in no window manager at all. :(