Awesome and Xfce4

Replacing xfwm4 by awesome wm
Open Xfce Settings Manager (LC_ALL=C opens it without any localization): LC_ALL=C xfce4-settings-manager Navigate to Session and Startup then open Session tab.

Here you see the list of apps your Xfce4 session consists of. You should have xfwm4 in that list. Now you need to switch Restart Style of xfwm4 to Never.

Then go to Application Autostart tab and add awesome to your autostart.

Now fire this command: killall xfwm4

Next time you log in your xfce4 session you gonna get awesome startead as well.

For now you can use Alt+F2 and enter awesome to run this awesome window manager.

Wallpaper setting problems
For some reason in Debian 7 Wheezy I had problem using xfce4 to set wallpapers. So I ended up disabling xfdesktop service and making awesome in charge of wallpaper setting. This is not any different to disabling xfwm4 like we did in 1st part of this article:

Open Xfce Settings Manager (LC_ALL=C opens it without any localization): LC_ALL=C xfce4-settings-manager Navigate to Session and Startup then open Session tab.

Here you see the list of apps your Xfce4 session consists of. You should have xfdesktop in that list. Now you need to switch Restart Style of xfdesktop to Never.

Now fire this command: killall xfdesktop

Panels
You can choose to disable all Xfce4 panels (you can even disable xfce4-panel service altogether) and use only awesome panels. The other choice can be combining both of 2 worlds.

Option 1. Disabling Xfce panels
This is not any different to disabling xfwm4 like we did in 1st part of this article:

Open Xfce Settings Manager (LC_ALL=C opens it without any localization): LC_ALL=C xfce4-settings-manager Navigate to Session and Startup then open Session tab.

Here you see the list of apps your Xfce4 session consists of. You should have xfce4-panel in that list. Now you need to switch Restart Style of xfce4-panel to Never.

Now fire this command: killall xfce4-panel

Option 2. Making foreign panels work well with awesome
The problems you can encounter when you use some other panels when running awesome are:
 * Your panel can be closed or minimized by awesome hotkey press if you click on panel (see fix for it below).
 * Your panel will steal your application focus if you click on panel and there is no fix for it yet. But you can get used to it -- just remember to switch to your task back after using mouse on panel.

There are the fixes you may want to apply.

Make your kill hotkey look like this to prevent killing the panel: awful.key({ modkey, "Shift"  }, "c",      function (c)                                                 if not c.name == "xfce4-panel" then                                                    c:kill                                                 end

Make your minimize hotkey look like this to prevent panel minimizing: awful.key({ modkey,          }, "n",      function (c)                       	                         if not c.name == "xfce4-panel" then                                                    c.minimized	= not c.minimized                                                 end                                              end),