Why do GTK2 apps look funny when I'm not in Gnome?

[Jomboni]

Meaning... when I run them from Fluxbox or another window manager, the fonts for the menus and everything seem a bit bigger, and the fonts are kind of ugly, but when I run them under Gnome 2 they look great?

Old GTK 1.2 apps like Galeon and Gaim look fine either way, it only seems to be GTK2 apps...

[smokybobo]

That's because when gnome2 starts, it automatically runs a daemon called 'gnome-settings-daemon' which is what retrieves your saved settings under .gnome2

You'll need to start it up along with any other apps when you start the WM/DE.

Just as an interesting note, that used to be very annoying on my debian box (gnome-settings-daemon always took 9MB ram!!!), but recently I no longer need to run that program so I assume that either a newer release of gnome2 fixed this problem or the package maintainer fixed it. You mileage will vary depending on your distro of choice.

[Jomboni]

That did the trick! I don't really mind an extra 9 megs of RAM since I have 512... and even with this running Fluxbox takes up far less memory than Gnome ever did! Thanks!