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. -- metacity in not starting on login https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/550082 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is subscribed to metacity in ubuntu. -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs