The next major release of metacity, the gnome window manager, will have a built in composite manager that will build enabled by default if libxcomposite is installed.
To try this without installing it, install subverion and run the following in a terminal:
mkdir metacity-trunk
cd metacity-trunk
svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/metacity/trunk metacity
cd metacity
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
then run ‘./src/metacity — replace’ to run it directly from the source tree.To activate the composite manager, run the following command in a terminal window.
gconftool-2 -s /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager –type bool true
It performs quite fast although not as fast as xfwm4 but lacks the extra eye candy offered by compiz. Still most users should find it sufficient. Another good thing is that it doesn’t need libcm installed.
It should look something like the picture below. Note that transparency works in gnome-terminal.
If you decide to install it permanently, simple run:
su -c 'install -m755 ./src/metacity /usr/bin'
This will replace the installed metacity binary executable with the new one. It works perfectly on my Nvidia card despite my old AMD 2300+ Sempron processor.
