Metacity-2.8.6

Introduction to Metacity

The Metacity package contains a window manager. This is useful for organizing and displaying windows.

Package information

Download (HTTP): http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/metacity/2.8/metacity-2.8.6.tar.bz2
Download (FTP): ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/metacity/2.8/metacity-2.8.6.tar.bz2
Download MD5 sum: c49e4b5575503975516159780855e317
Download size: 2.1 MB
Estimated disk space required: 46.9 MB
Estimated build time: 0.41 SBU

Metacity dependencies

Required

intltool-0.32.1, GConf-2.8.1, and GTK+-2.6.4

Optional

startup-notification-0.8, Xrender*, and libXcomposite**

* libXrender is included in a BLFS X Window System installation, but the pkgconfig .pc file Metacity looks for is not installed. Satisfy the requirement by installing an xrender.pc file into /usr/X11R6/lib/pkgconfig which can be installed as:

cat > /usr/X11R6/lib/pkgconfig/xrender.pc << "EOF"
prefix=/usr/X11R6
exec_prefix=${prefix}
libdir=${exec_prefix}/lib
includedir=${prefix}/include

Name: Xrender
Description: X Render Library
Version: 0.8.3
Cflags: -I${includedir} -I/usr/X11R6/include
Libs: -L${libdir} -lXrender  -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11
EOF

** libXcomposite can optionally be used, but here's what the Metacity package maintainer has to say about it in the configure script if the package is found: “Not building compositing manager by default now, must enable explicitly to get it. And it doesn't work, so don't bother unless you want to hack on it...”

Installation of Metacity

Install Metacity by running the following commands:

./configure --prefix=/usr --libexecdir=/usr/sbin --sysconfdir=/etc &&
make

Now, as the root user:

make install

Command explanations

--with-gconf-schema-file-dir=/etc/gnome/gconf/schemas: Use this option if you have the GNOME-2 GConf package installed.

Configuring Metacity

Configuration Information

To automatically start the Metacity window manager when you issue the startx command, append to (or create) .xinitrc using the command below. Ensure you backup your current ~/.xinitrc before proceeding.

cat >> ~/.xinitrc << "EOF"
xterm &
exec metacity
EOF

Beyond Linux From Scratch - Version 6.0

Chapter 27. Window Managers