Metacity

Introduction

Metacity is a traditional window manager commonly used with the Gnome desktop system. Recently, it has developmental support for GL compositing that can be enabled in special 2.16 version ebuilds. The xeffects overlay is required for a compositing Metacity ebuild. See HOWTO Gentoo xeffects for more information.

Installation

GL Compositing

Gnome 2.16 includes a version of Metacity which includes compositing features. These features are officially disabled in 2.16, scheduled for release in 2.18. Please also note that there is no existing documentation on how to use these new features. Compositing is, however, an optional USE flag in the xeffects version of metacity. Compositing is officially supported with Metacity 2.22 (part of Gnome 2.22) or later. To enable compositing in metacity 2.22 execute:

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

If you have an up-to-date xeffects overlay, just add the following to your package files:

x11-wm/metacity xcomposite

x11-wm/metacity

Next, simply install the package:

# emerge --ask metacity

Emerging libcm

libcm is required for a compositing Metacity. The version in the xeffects overlay has problems compiling when the OpenGL interface is set to 'nvidia'. To allow compiling:

# eselect opengl set xorg-x11 && emerge --oneshot libcm && eselect opengl set nvidia

or just execute:

# eselect opengl set nvidia --impl-headers
# emerge --oneshot libcm

Standard

Standard non-compositing versions of Metacity are already in portage. Simply:

# emerge metacity