Trying on a rawhide installation 'man gnome-wm', which is supplied by
gnome-session-2.24.1-3.fc10, you can read the following:
NAME
gnome-wm - Launches the user selected window manager for the
GNOME session
The catch is none what is described down this page seems to be true.
If you will look at /usr/bin/gnome-wm script then you can find in it
the following:
# NOTE: DON'T USE THIS. Please have your window manager install
# a desktop file and change the gconf key
# /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager
That gconf key used to be /apps/gnome-session/rh/window_manager and
that worked, even if 'man gnome-wm' was telling fairy tales. With
/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager the best
I could achieve was a session with no window manager at all. I tried
some interpretations of an "install a desktop file" remark but this
got me nowhere.
There are hacks to get another window manager running. For example,
you can put early enough in $PATH a link, named 'metacity', to a
desired window manager binaries. In case some option mapping would be
required then this link should be replaced by an appropriate shell
script but you get the drift. So you can have any windown manager
you want as long as it is _called_ "metacity".
Is this un-documented somewhere and I missed it or this is a straight
bugzilla material? A Google search brought me only numerous tales of
woe from people attempting switch window managers for Gnome and
miserably failing.
Michal
p.s. For "again" part check
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=449048