While I updated ubuntu from 10.04 to 10.10 my keyboard stopped working. Then I saw that the window borders were missing. So it seemed that metacity crashed. But how can I restart metacity without a keyboard?
In your main menu click: System > Preferences > Appearance and change your Visual Effects from the current value to something else.
That worked for me. Metacity restarted and the keyboard resumed its work.
Source: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Metacity
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Metacity is called when “Visual Effects” is set to None.
You can also reach the dialog where it is running (ALT+F2) gnome-appearance-properties .
Or, faster, you can start metacity by running (ALT+F2) metacity –replace . This is also useful when you have disabled a keyboard shortcut (from gnome-keybinding-properties , e.g. ALT+F1 -that shows the main menu of the panel-) but still works (F5 or CTRL+R on the desktop don’t solve it).