Comment 4 for bug 57099

OK, I think I can shed some light here. Like I suspected, it seems that these people did not get what they expected (a useful session sorta kinda like Gnome) but Sawfish works as designed: you do get a menu on the middle mouse button, but nothing much else.

The proper way to use Sawfish under Gnome is not as a replacement for Gnome, but as a replacement for Metacity, or what have you (Compiz, these days?) and in that function, Sawfish continues to work brilliantly.

The fix here I think would be to remove the Sawfish option from the GDM "sessions" menu, since few people really want to replace Gnome with Sawfish, and those who do probably aren't scared of adding it to the menu by hand.

I'm guessing /usr/share/xsessions/sawfish.desktop is responsible for offering Sawfish as a session-manager option in gdm?

In the meantime, if you do want to use Sawfish as your window manager, configure it under System -> Sessions. This is somewhat tricky, because you basically want to kill metacity from underneath, then start up sawfish somehow while you are running without a window manager, and then save that as your preferrend session. I'm too chicken to attempt to provide foolproof instructions, but if I managed to do it, so can you (-: