How to try the new metacity composite manager without installing it

Author: Hussam Al-Tayeb

Metacity is the default window manager for the Gnome desktop. The next major version of metacity (2.22) to be released later this year, will have a built in composite manager that will be enabled by default if libxcomposite is installed.

First you need to have ‘glx’ module enabled in the system’s xorg.conf file.

Section “Module”

……….

Load “glx”

……….

EndSection

and the xorg composite extension enabled. This should be enabled by default in xorg-server 1.4.x but for older releases, you need to add the following changes to your xorg config file.

Section “Extensions”

Option “Composite” “true”

EndSection

To try this without installing it, install subversion and run the following in a terminal:

mkdir metacity-trunk

cd metacity-trunk

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/metacity/trunk metacity

cd metacity

./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr

then run ‘./src/metacity — replace’ to run it directly from the source tree.To activate the composite manager, run the following command in a terminal window.

gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager –type bool true

It performs quite fast although not as fast as xfwm4 but lacks the extra eye candy offered by compiz. Still most users should find it sufficient. Another good thing is that it doesn’t need libcm installed. This means it doesn’t need indirect rendering so it will run on the proprietary Nvidia driver.

It should look something like the picture below. Note that transparency works in gnome-terminal.

Click on image to enlarge

If you decide to install it permanently, simply run:

su -c ‘install -m755 ./src/metacity /usr/bin’

This will replace the installed metacity binary executable with the new one. It works perfectly on my Nvidia card despite my old AMD 2300+ Sempron processor.