switching window managers with Gnome 2.24.3 (and its session bug)

[George Hartzell]

I'm fond of sawfish.  I upgraded to 2.24.3 over the weekend and now
can't seem to convince it to let me switch from metacity to sawfish.

I run my X session using startx, which exec's a gnome-session.

I've used the technique described in item 9 of the FAQ (kill metacity,
start sawfish, use gnome-session to save things) to no avail.

I'm assuming that it not working is related to the problem with
session management in Gnome 2.24 (see item 4 in the faq224.html).

As described here:

  http://damumbl.byteholder.de/blog/?p=44

I've tried changing the gconf key:

  /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/current

to sawfish but I end up without a window manager and a message on my
console from gnome-session that says:

  gnome-session[80010]: WARNING: Unable to find provider 'sawfish' of
  required component 'windowmanager'.

After messing around a bit I finally got it to work by copying 

  /usr/local/share/gnome/wm-properties/Sawfish.desktop

to

  ~/.local/share/applications/sawfish.desktop

and there was much joy.

Simple renaming Sawfish.desktop to sawfish.desktop in the original
directory didn't seem to have any effect.

g.