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I have my home directory on NFS and I use gnome from different machines (and in VNC sessions) that have screens with different resolutions and other differences. It would be _really_ nice to tell gnome that my confugiration should be saved on per-DISPLAY basis instead of globally.
There is a planned fix for this in the next major revision of GNOME (2.0) which will probably appear in the first half of next year. There's no good way to retrofit it to the current version of GNOME however.
Thinking about it, as a bad hack you could make ~/.gnome and ~/.gnome_private symlinks that get moved to reflect the hostname when you log in, but it isn't going to be very satisfactory.
That what I was thinking - is there some central place in Gnome libs that defines ~/.gnome? What about ~/.sawfish? I believe the easiest way to fix the problem is to change those places so that I could use an environment variable to overwrite those directories. Of course, I could just redefine $HOME, but that would break to much other programs...
I have the patches to gnome-1.2 you need to do per display gnome configuration. It does all of the settings so shares less than you might like (eg calendar data!). They may go into 1.4 in some form but if you want them now email me and I'll send you the patch
I was thinking - a part of what I really want is a way to make sure that I have a separate Gnome session configuration per display size. But everything else (including things like calendar and mouse focus type) should stay the same. So somebody should decide, what kind of setting it would make sense to share, what should be tied to display size and what should be tied to DISPLAY variable. Of course, some of the choises should be user-controlled, but a sensible default is also necessary.
Right, the sensible default and correct behavior will come with full GConf deployment, probably not until GNOME 2.0 though GNOME 1.4 will contain GConf usage for some applications. In GNOME 2.0 we will finally be able to re-enable support for multiple sessions, since GConf will allow them to be handled sanely. Anyway as far as I'm concerned this bug will get fixed in GNOME 2.0, because I don't think the "hack display name into .gnome path" solution is really a solution for most users, though some hack-oriented users may find it a small improvement.
This is a large-scale change affecting all gnome apps, not something we will fix on the RH level (we are working on it upstream in the GNOME Project though)