[plug] gnome themes and xfwm4 or metacity

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 11:29 +0800, rpowersau at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Doe sanybody have a link to a good site for information on gnome
> themes, what they are and how to use them?
> 
> I've seen mention of xfwm4 and metacity on the list but really can't
> find where to select them. I've gone to the computer menu and selected
> "Desktop preferences" -> "Themes" but I don't see any mention of xfwm4
> or metacity there?
> 
> Yes, I'm very new to gnome.  :)

Metacity and xfwm4 aren't themes, they're window managers. The window
manager is a program - often used as part of a desktop environment -
that controls, tracks, and manages windows. It is responsible for
placing windows on screen, drawing their title bars and borders, moving
them, maximising/minimising/iconifying them, and setting policy about
how windows get and lose focus, get positioned, etc.

Different window managers have different features, options, and
appearance. It is possible to theme most window managers to change the
appearance of the title bar, etc.

GNOME normally uses Metacity, and it's not normally noticable except as
a small part of GNOME that does a specific job. However, you can tell
GNOME to use something other than metacity, so long as it understands
GNOME's messages and rules. I use xfwm4, the window manager from the
XFCE4 desktop, for this because I find it faster, more configurable, and
lets me turn off some of the really annoying "eye candy".

In particular, metacity's restricted resources mode has this hideous
grid-style window drag frame, and metacity won't let me ignore clicks in
the body of windows in mouse focus mode.

I wouldn't recommend changing window managers at this point. If you're
interested in xfwm4, try out the XFCE4 desktop - it might be packaged
for your distro, or you can get it from http://www.xfce.org/ . You'll
probably want to use nautilus, the GNOME file manager, instead of xffm,
the XFCE file manager (*shudder*) though.

If you really want to change your window manager, you can use
gnome-session-properties to set metacity not to restart automatically,
then do something like this in a terminal:
	pkill metacity && xfwm4 || metacity
that should kill metacity, and try to start xfwm4. If xfwm4 fails, it
should relaunch metacity so you're not left without a window manager.

--
Craig Ringer