Metacity not working under FC5
 

My first attempt to utilise the opensource paradigm and (hopefully) get help on/from LQ :-) :-)

I've been running FedoraCore5 for a few years (updated from earler FC versions - and RHxx of course) but, after trying to load FlashPlayer or some such ??(=not sure what caused it) the "default Gnome" "session" doesn't work any more - it just hangs at the Metacity Window Manager part of the GUI's startup.
Iffen I go to the "failsafe Gnome" or "KDE" sessions everything seems to work OK - but I'm just used to the basic Gnome GUI and I'd like to get the "default Gnome" session working again if poss.

The "failsafe Gnome" session says it is bypassing the startup scripts and uses an un-titled Window Manager which seems to work OK.
But, after searching through all the Metacity folders under /usr and /etc looking for these startupscripts? I came across a line which one runs in a terminal - metacity --replace - which seems to improve resolution quite a lot.
In /var/log/messages, when I looked there,the successful startups (using "failsafe..") seemed to have this extra line of code on the end :
(Feb 9 16:32:43 localhost gconfd (root-2307): Resolved address "xml:readwrite:/root/.gconf" to a writable configuration source at position
0)
The unsuccessful/hangup ones don't seem to have this line.

Would be grateful for any tips.

TIA
PaulW

The metacity --replace is a convention used by window managers (e.g. kwin, compiz, metacity, etc.) which means to kill the existing window manager and replace it with the calling window manager.

Another great part of the open source paradigm is free and frequent updates :) Fedora 8 has been around for a while, and it might turn out to be worth it to install that over FC5 (a collateral benefit will be a fresh start). Just be sure to back up your files in advance :)