gnome-panel/session management

[Benedict J. Brown]

I'm running openbox 3.1 on Mandrake 10.0, and have the same problem
Brad describes below, namely that the gnome-panel window list only
works if it's started from within openbox.  Even starting it after
openbox is running doesn't work, so I assume it must be a child
process.  Does anyone know a solution to this?  I can think of several
ways of dealing with this, but don't know how to do any of them:

1) Get openbox to run a script on startup
2) Perhaps some kind of session manager (e.g. xsm) works, but I'm not
familiar with these
3) A replacement to window-list that runs in the gnome-panel and
doesn't need to be a child process
4) Some other panel entirely, but which can swallow gnome panel
applets, and can be very small

Thanks,
Benedict

Subject: Problem with gnome-panel and openbox
From: Brad Smith <brad_stephenssmith at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 21:52:52 -0700 (PDT)

Hi,

I used to run openbox under rh9 and had a really nice setup. My
xinitrc started openbox, gnome-panel, a chbg and that's about it. It
was very nice and very fast. Since I upgraded to Fedora and the newer
version of Gnome that came with it, I've been having some strange
problems, though.

If I have openbox and gnome-panel in my xinitrc, the windowlist applet
dies as soon as the panel loads with:

The panel encountered a problem while loading "OAFIID:GNOME_WindowListApplet"
Details: Unknown CORBA exception id: 'IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0'

However, if I take gnome-panel out of my xinitrc and then start it
manually after the
fact, everything works fine. Likewise if I start a full gnome-session
and run openbox --replcae everything works fine.

Anyone have any idea what the problem might be? I'm running 3.2, but
have had the same problem with 3.0 and 2.3.

--Brad