Get your gnome metacity decorations back

Hey,

I was playing around with gnome and openbox (and compiz) and to my surprise i didn’t had any decorations in gnome anymore when i switched back to just gnome (no openbox nor compiz). I did a search on google to try and find the fix but sadly there wasn’t any good one. People with similar problems got the suggestion to add metacity in the gnome-session tool which should also work but isn’t the solution because it simply isn’t in there when everything is working and when you didn’t screw with other windows managers yet.

So i did a search on my other pc where it was all working fine to see where metacity really has to be enabled. It turns out that you have to be in gconf to do that!
But not on this gconf location: “/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager” like what was suggested in ubuntu’s forums. You have to be in this location: “/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager” illustrated by the screenshot below.

And make sure the key (selected row in the image): “windowmanager” is set to “metacity“.
You can access that same tool by pressing: ALT +  F2 then type in: “gconf-editor“.

If you don’t have that tool or don’t know how to get it you can insert the metacity value directly with this line:
“gconftool-2 -s -t string /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager metacity”
You can just enter that line in the run box (again by pressing ALT + F2).

Also note that if you encounter a bug like this, no decorations while you had them, and you didn’t edited files yourself but just installed and removed packages that your distribution provides then it’s a bug in those packages and should be reported. So if it’s not reported please do so to help your distribution get better.

I hope this helped anyone with a similar issue,
Mark.