Using XFCE4 with awesome

When I got tired of using the standard XFCE window manager, xfwm, I simply installed openbox and selected "XFCE/Openbox" session in the GDM login screen. This was very convenient because I didn't want the plain Openbox session in which there are no network-manager, no panels, nothing.

Now I have installed awesome: I really like the idea of tiling window managers. But after I launched it, everything went wrong. Absence of XFCE panels isn't anything bad, but subpixel-aliased fonts were somehow turned on, and that was really awful.

I tried to login in XFCE, kill openbox/xfwm and start awesome, but that didn't worked: xfce4-session keeps restarting it's predefined WM, and killing it kills the whole X session too. And I didn't found the configuration for a dropdown list in GDM either.

How can I start XFCE session with awesome as a WM?

I might not be the right person to answer this, since I prefer Openbox partly because it doesn't set up panels and whatnot, but the section on xfce here seems like it might help you out.

The idea is that you configure your awesome session through that text file, and then link it to your "Xsession"

ln -s ~/.xinitrc ~/.Xsession

and then "select Xsession in your Session list at the login interface"

This is attacking it at a lower level than Ubuntu normally does, so there is possibly a more integrated way to do this. I'm also not totally sure what those commands will do, eg if they will actually cause the xfce panel to be displayed, but it seems worth a go at least.

This article from my own blog might help. Or the short version: Use

killall xfwm4 && awesome

It is as easy as that.