Re: Fullscreen apps problem

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 10:01:52AM -0500, Ben Davis wrote:
> I have a lot of problems with my window manager (metacity) when it comes 
> to some fullscreen applications...  For some reason, when an application 
> attempts to go fullscreen, the window manager takes over and still put 
> decorations on the window.  The only way I can get it to true fullscreen 
> is to have to go the extra step of using the feature of metacity that 
> lets you maximize the window and remove the border (i.e. the keybinding 
> for "fullscreen" mode)...    Strangly enough this doesn't happen with 
> all fullscreen apps, mplayer and frozen-bubble seem to know how to get 
> around this but other fullscreen apps do not (such as mythtv).
> 
> Should I file a bug on this or is it already out there?
> 

No bug please (not against metacity anyway). The Extended Window
Manager Hints (EWMH) on freedesktop.org introduced the
_NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN hint because WM's can't get fullscreen apps
right otherwise.

Historically, all these apps use different weird random hacks to go
fullscreen. Metacity tries to detect the hacks and tries to make it
work, but at this point I don't know more workarounds to add.

In the meantime, there is a supported, working way to go fullscreen
which is _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN; some apps (probably the ones that
work) are already using it.

The keybinding for fullscreen toggles _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN, so you
can work around it manually, but the app can also do this itself.

Havoc