Wednesday 12 August 2009

Enable Composite Manager in Metacity

Not every computer has the resources to run Compiz, but if you pine after some nice effects like window shadows then there is a good chance your computer is capable of running simpler effects. i use this on my Acer Aspire One, sure it can manage Compiz, but it is a little overkill on the baby netbook.

Well rejoice now as Metacity has a composite manager built in which can give you nice drop shadows as well as a window preview on alt+tab and that  pesky inactive window title-bar transparency (which I detailed how to disable last post).

Enable the composite manager in gconf-editor and navigate to the branch in apps/metacity/general

Tick the box next to the setting composite_manager and you are now hopefully enjoying drop shadows... Yay!

A quick alternative is to paste this into a terminal

gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool true

and if you need to disable it again use:

gconftool-2 -s '/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager' --type bool false




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There were a few good tips here. Thanks.