Metacity

[Marc Schwartz]

On Fri, 2004-01-30 at 12:56, Bevan C. Bennett wrote:
> David L Norris wrote:
> > Main Menu -> Preferences -> (More Preferences ->) Sessions
> > 
> > Select the Current Session tab.  Highlight metacity and click the
> remove
> > button.  Click the Apply button.  Main Menu -> Run and type whatever
> > command starts the window manager you prefer.  Once its running
> select
> > it in the Session manager, change Style to Restart, and click the
> apply
> > button.
> 
> Have you actually tried this? I tried to switch someone to sawfish in 
> this manner.
> First problem: you have to set metacity to not be automatically 
> restarted when it dies (the default) or it just comes back.


To go to sawfish, you should be able to open a terminal window and use:

killall metacity; sawfish &

then

gnome-session-save

That worked for me when I was experimenting with using a different WM
under GNOME due to the discussed Metacity issues. You can of course
replace the 'sawfish &' with whatever WM command you wish.

I did not like sawfish, so then I tried XFWM4. However there are issues
with gnome-panel positioning using that. The bugs are known and in
Bugzilla. It was a strut issue as I recall.

Thus, I made the full transition to XFCE4 and Rox, which I like and have
stayed with. In fact in just the past few days, I stopped using the Rox
pinboard (for desktop icons) and used MenuMaker to create an XML
'right-click' xfdesktop menu structure. I now have a clean desktop, with
a single XFCE main panel and am using the XFCE iconbox (rather than the
XFCE taskbar). This can also be set to only show minimized apps and from
all or only the current desktop.

It all works well and is fast.

For those curious, I uploaded two screen captures, the first my 'clean'
XFCE4 desktop, the second with a few windows open. The open windows show
the WM theme, the GTK2 theme, the XFCE settings manager and a Rox filer
window using the latest Crystal SVG MIME theme icons (manually
configured via Rox) and of course the iconbox in the LR corner. BTW, the
wallpaper is from kde-look.org.

A different "look" for FC1.

If anyone has any questions, let me know. These are 1600 x 1200 (UXGA)
images:

1. http://www.medanalytics.com/Screenshot-1.png
2. http://www.medanalytics.com/Screenshot-2.png

I'll leave these up for a while.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz