Disappeared Window Manager

I use Ubuntu 10.04 at home. I am a GNOME guy since the days of RHL 9. One day, suddenly, all of a sudden, the maximize, minimize and close icons on all my windows just disappeared. Just like that. Didnt know what hit me. I had to go to the menu item, and close it. Then Googling, I found out that there is this guy called "metacity", a window manager, who is incharge of these kinds of stuff in the GUI for GNOME. From this link, I found out how to give it a boot, and bring back my lifesavers.

All you had to do is:

1. Check if its already running

ps aux | grep metacity

2. Then, if its not (even if its running), just load it.

sudo metacity

3. If it gives an error like "Window manager warning: Screen 0 on display ":0.0" already has a window manager;", then just force it

 sudo metacity --replace

There is a catch here. this will occupy a terminal window. So, I'd suggest, you give the system a restart, if you arent into anything utterly serious.

I expertly went ahead and killed that process, and my whole GUI went for a toss. Nothing worked (except the mouse). So, I had to run to my second login screen, do a

kill -9 METACITY-PID

of the metacity manager, and restart it with

sudo metacity --display=:0.0 --replace

And then, after I had saved my documents, I restarted the system. All is well, that restarted well.


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