metacity in not starting on login

[pools]

Binary package hint: metacity

Description: Ubuntu lucid (development branch)
Release: 10.04
metacity:
  Instalovaná verze: 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu7
  Kandidát: 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu7
  Tabulka verzí:
 *** 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu7 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Metacity isn't starting after login. Windows start without borders and I have to run "metacity" command to start it myself. I'm not using any desktop effects. Video card is Intel GMA945.

[Pento (naplanetu)]

Lucid.
I have same problem.
Visual effects are off

[komputes (komputes)]

Do both of you have Lucid systems that were installed at the Alpha stage of Lucid? If so, can you reproduce the issue with a LiveCD or installation of 10.04 LTS as released?

[seth (sethburrows7)]

On 05/03/2010 04:48 PM, komputes wrote:
> Do both of you have Lucid systems that were installed at the Alpha stage
> of Lucid? If so, can you reproduce the issue with a LiveCD or
> installation of 10.04 LTS as released?
>
>
no i only installed starting with the first beta

i had to edit gconf so that wherever it said "compiz", i changed to
"metacity"

it seemed to work.

[Kochin (kochinc)]

There seem to be a few possible causes that make metacity not to start after login. I experienced this problem after upgraded Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 to UNE 10.04 final and cleaned out some stale packages.

To find out what happened, you can turn on the debug mode for gnome-session by modifying the line
    exec $STARTUP
in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/99x11-common_start to
    exec $STARTUP --debug
Then logout and login again, and search the file ~/.xsession-errors for 'Phase WINDOW_MANAGER'. Read the lines below it to see what happened when gnome-session tried to start metacity. It may also be useful to search for 'metacity' in that file.

In my case, I found a line stating
    app /org/gnome/SessionManager/App29 is disabled by Hidden
It turned out the /org/gnome/SessionManager/App29 was actually read from /home/<user>/.local/share/applications/metacity.desktop, and in that file there existed a line
    Hidden=true

Since there is a system-wide metacity.desktop located in /usr/share/applications, I simply deleted the one in ~/.local/share/applications so that gnome-session can read it instead. Logout and login again. Metacity started up nicely without any problem.

Don't forget to remove the --debug parameter after you are done with debugging.

[Ken Sharp (kennybobs)]

I can confirm that removing ~/.local/share/applications/metacity.desktop fixes the problem. Although other accounts on the same computer never had this problem in the first place.