can't add workspace names when using compiz

First off, I should say that I'm not an expert. I had an old install of Ubuntu that I used infrequently; I believe it was 7.04. Mostly, I was using Windows, and had installed Wubi. I believe the Wubi install was 8.04. Anyway, Windows crashed (see my boot.ini report for details), and I couldn't recover Windows (or Wubi). I've spent all weekend re-installing Windows to a new hard disk, downloading Service Packs, Anti-Virus upgrades, and so on, and figuring out how to set up grub to not step on Windows.

Since I couldn't "dist-upgrade" 7.04 directly, I downloaded a Ubuntu 8.10 ISO, and installed from it. So, I now have what I believe is a new, fairly stock dual-boot system.

The problem I am having now is that I can't figure out how to rename my workspaces. I used to be able to do this, although I'm not sure whether it was under 7.04 or 8.04. From chats on IRC with Brucevdk, I currently understand the situation to be this: compiz doesn't support the renaming the same way MetaCity did. As I understand it, the window manager switched underneath me, and the functionality went away. Brucevdk pointed me at bug 129152, but the bug is closed, discussion there is long and muddled in separate issues, and seems to apply to non-current versions. I wanted to make sure my current issue was addressed. Additionally, I have further concerns regarding documentation (below).

Returning to the main issue: I can right-click on the window manager windows, and bring up the preferences window, but the "Workspace Switcher Preferences" window that shows up only has two inputs: one for number of columns, and one for number of rows. I don't see a UI for naming workspaces (I have 4 workspaces, 1 row, 4 columns) like I remember. For all I know this could be a UI glitch, not a window manager difference. In any case, I don't think I've strayed from the 8.10 defaults. The Visual Effects tab under the System->Preferences->Appearance menu shows "Normal". I mention it, because it's not clear to me what these mean, but seems important to various parties. If this controls whether the window manager is Metacity or Compiz, then you should know that this isn't at all obvious to a newbie.

Secondary issue, possibly for a separate bug: I looked at the help for the Workspaces that is found by right-clicking the Help icon on the panel application for the "workspace manager". It didn't give any insight into naming these desktop workspaces under compiz. If the info is there, I couldn't find it. I felt surprised that the old behavior (naming workspaces) wasn't documented at a minimum, and that there wasn't an obvious workaround, now that the behavior seems to have changed.

Am filing this bug under libwnck, since bug 129152 was confirmed under that package, and I can't offer a better guess.