Ubuntu
metacity package

  1. Bug #550082
  2. Comment #4

Comment 4 for bug 550082

Revision history for this message
Kochin (kochinc) wrote :

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.