Tech professionals and many home computer users are aware of the significance of the fabulous Ubuntu – a Linux distribution which is known most for its user friendliness. The window manager used as default in the GNOME desktop environment is the Metacity and is released under the GNU General Public License.
The default Metacity window manager has built-in GNOME 2.22. What this means is that without switching windows managers, you can get your eye candy effects. The main advantage of using this is that you can run applications such as Awn, Screenlets and GNOME without needing eye candy applications like Compiz. Additionally you can maximise or minimize animations, and get shadows and shaded Alt-tab effects. Metacity works well inside VirtualBox even without needing accelerated graphics to run with compositing. However, there’s no simple interface to turn it on and can be enabled through the GNOME Configuration Editor, or by using the terminal.
How to set up Metacity as the default window manager in Ubuntu
Following the below instructions.
Step 1: The GNOME Configuration Editor needs to be opened.
Step 2: To open the Run Application dialog, press Alt+F2. Type gconf-editor in the space and click ‘Run’.
Step 3: Go to apps ->metacity ->general and check the ‘compositing_manager’ box. This will enable Metacity to restart with compositing.
Instructions to Install Gnome on Kubuntu
Kubuntu is a derivative of the Ubuntu OS that uses the KDE software compilation instead of the GNOME graphical interface. Although the following instructions are for GNOME, the same principle can be applied for addition of KDE to Ubuntu.
Step 1: Click on the ‘KMenu’ option and then click on ‘System’. For launching a terminal window, choose ‘Konsole’.
Step 2: Select ‘Terminal’. In Terminal, copy and paste the following command, without the commas.
‘sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop’
Step 3: It would result in a very long list of software packages which you would be asked to confirm. However, before you confirm it, think about whether you would ever want to completely uninstall the GNOME software anytime later. If you want, you can copy all packages by highlighting them and save them to a separate file. Now when you are ready for the installation, type ‘y’. The downloading procedure would begin.
Step 4: During the process, a window will prompt you to choose the Default Display Manager. If you want to use GNOME more frequently, choose ‘GDM’. Otherwise choose ‘KDM’.
Step 5: To close the terminal, type ‘exit’ and then log out.
Step 6: Once you get back to the Login screen, select ‘Session’ followed by ‘GNOME’. Then proceed further to log in as you normally do. This would enable you to be logged into GNOME.
The task is completed once you follow the steps. However, before you go ahead with the proceedings, it must be ensured that the system has a proper Graphical User Interface and Webmin in place too.
