When opening new application windows, Metacity's default behaviour is
to attempt to them in the same screen as the mouse. If there is
insufficient space for it in that screen, it will open it in some other
screen.
In multi screen desktops e.g. Access Grid rooms, it is sometimes
desirable for new windows to appear in a particular screen - regardless
of whether there is sufficient space or not. The downloadable Slackware
package below is for a version of Metacity that has been patched so
that Metacity will always attempt to open new windows in the same
screen as the mouse pointer. Some applications, e.g. Mozilla, choose
their own screen despite Metacity's best efforts.
In both the following methods, the upgradepkg
command is probably best performed when metacity isn't actually running
already (from runlevel 3).
To install the prebuilt Slackware package, run the following command
(as root) in a shell: upgradepkg
metacity-2.8.1-i486-2.tgz
That will remove the default metacity package and replace it with the
patched version.
To build from the source package, unpack it and cd into the resulting
metacity-2.8.1 directory. From there, run the Slack.build script with
the command:
sh Slack.build
That will leave a metacity-2.8.1-i486-2.tgz package in the same
directory, from where you can now run (as root): upgradepkg
metacity-2.8.1-i486-2.tgz
NOTE:
Some applications, e.g. Mozilla, don't respond to Metacity's placement
instructions and continue to appear where they're not necessarily
wanted. Such cases are mostly fixed by running the following commend
from a shell:
To Doug Kosovic of University of Queensland Vislab for working this
out. His RPM version of the patch is at:
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~grangenet/ag_fedora/extras/
Comments and suggestions
to Chris Willing <willing at itee.uq.edu.au>
