Beginners Guide to Eyecandy

I am very new to Ubuntu (installed only a couple months ago as a full time OS). I am lost in the world of themes and eyecandy.

What is metacity or GTK1 or 2. Murrine? Beryl? Compiz? Are they seperate windows theme managers? Can I run them all or do I have to choose one? I see that some control colors and others control the borders and frames.

Basically I am looking for an article / thread that will take me by the hand and tell me what I can or can't do as far as eye candy goes. I know I can't do beryl (ATI video) without a congressional act.

Thanks for any help you long timers can give me.

yes you can do beryl/ati i use my x800 and my x1600 and beryl works with both... beryl ,compiz and metacity are window managers and GTK is a theme manager , you can have 1 window manager 1 theme manager and 1 window decorator like emerald. the manager handles the windows lol, the decorator handles the window borders like the titlebar and stuff like that and the theme manager handles the colors of the insides of the windows and the drop down menus and such. hope this answers your question

Thanks - that made sense of things. Where do I choose which of each manager I want?

well that depends on what you've got installed, ubuntu uses metacity and gtk by default and metacity handles the decoration, if you install beryl it has a manager called beryl-manager where you can select the window manager and the window decorator... im not sure about how to switch GTK cuz i've never done it before.