Bug#225640: metacity: No menu, no nothing!.. after blank installation.

[Olly Betts]

I've just hit the same problem Per reported - installed metacity from
aptitude, and upon restarting X I get a blank chequerboard backdrop
and no apparent way to do anything except exit.  All I can really do
is Ctrl+Alt+F1, login at the console and uninstall metacity.

For someone less familiar with X, this could be a tricky situation to
recover from.  

Sebastien Bacher writes:
> Metacity is a window manager for gnome, he does nothing without it
> ... it just manages the windows, but without gnome you have no icons, no
> menu, no panel, etc ... just a background.

This really should be mentioned in the description.  I don't run Gnome,
and wouldn't have even tried installing metacity if the description had
said:

"Metacity is a small window manager for Gnome"

rather than

"Metacity is a small window manager, using gtk2 to do everything."

And if Metacity requires gnome, it should have a Depends: on the
appropriate Gnome package(s) (there's a "Suggests: gnome-control-center"
but that's all).  That way you don't end up with an unusable X desktop
even if you install metacity but later uninstall Gnome.

Cheers,
    Olly