Ian’s Blog

Metacity is finally getting some composite love! I remember this being promised back when Compiz was first introduced in early 2006, but never seeing any follow-through.

Since the original release of compiz, every few months I’ve grabbed a tarball of whatever the latest development version of metacity is and tried to compile some composite in, with the result always being that it failed miserably.

Riccardo Setti’s blog reported today that the [no longer] latest metacity, 2.21.5, now compiles with composite by default. Indeed, it does!

[UPDATE 15/3/08: Now that GNOME 2.22.0 is out, it no longer makes sense to point to the development version. If you want the sources, use the 2.22 sources.

If you want to see metacity’s new compositing features (which seem to be limited mostly to drop shadows and an unfinished-looking minimize animation), you can do the following:

Make sure you have metacity’s build dependencies. This can be done on Ubuntu and Debian systems with the following:

apt-get build-dep metacity

Get the sources:

wget http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/gnome/sources/metacity/2.22/metacity-2.22.0.tar.bz2

Untar them:

tar -xjvvf metacity-2.22.0.tar.bz2

Enter the untarred directory, and configure, make, and install the new metacity:

./configure && make && make install

Don’t pass –prefix=/usr to ./configure; that’s just bad practice. No special options need to be passed to the ./configure script to add composite support; it does it by default now.

Now, enable it in gconf and replace your current window manager with composited metacity:

gconftool –type=bool -s /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager 1 && /usr/local/metacity –replace

UPDATE:

If you’re using Hardy Heron, you don’t need to bother with all the above. Just:

gconftool –type=bool -s /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager 1

And you’re good.