Ubuntu Tips (beta)

Gnome terminal supports "profiles", which are collections of settings that affect the behavior and appearance of the terminal. These profiles can be used to greatly enhance your terminal experience.

The default Ubuntu desktop is configured with two "panels", one each at the top and bottom of the desktop. These panels contain various "applets" such as the system menu, the clock, the logout button, or the list of open applications (what Windows calls the taskbar). Fortunately, unlike Windows, the desktop's panels can be fully customized. This tip describes some of the common operations you might perform to customize the appearance and functionality of your desktop panels.

Unlike Windows, under Ubuntu, any visible window can be set to have an "always on top" state. Just right anywhere in the window's titlebar (the upper most portion) and click "Always on Top" in the menu that appears.

On a default Ubuntu system, any task which requires root (or Administrator) privileges runs a program called 'sudo' (or it's graphical equivalent, gksu) to run a helper program in a privileged mode. By default, for security reasons, this program will ask you to input your password. If you make a lot of settings changes on your system (or need to run a lot of programs as root), each password prompt can get rather annoying. This tip shows you how to configure sudo to allow specific users to run commands as root (or any other user) without prompting for a password.

If you can't get compiz to work on your machine, or you just to run a compositing window manager with shadows and true transparency without having to deal with hangs and memory leaks, you can run XFCE's window manager, xfwm4. It's possible to use xfwm4 as a drop-in replacement for the Metacity window manager in an existing GNOME desktop.

Metacity has some hidden configuration to bind keyboard shortcuts to arbitrary commands desktop wide.

While the configuration screens of various applications on the standard Ubuntu desktop may seem simplistic and sparse, the Gnome desktop offers a tool to configure the advanced settings of many programs. Sort of the Tweak UI for Ubuntu, if you will.

The command is called gconf-editor and can be run by hitting Alt + F2, and typing gconf-editor into the window that appears.

Settings can be browsed using the tree on the left.

VNC is a technology that allows one to access their desktop remotely, similar to the Microsoft Terminal Services client. If your computer runs a "VNC server", then you will be able to connect to it from other machines using "VNC clients."

The default Ubuntu desktop comes with a simply configured VNC Server. This can be accessed through System Menu > Preferences > Remote Desktop. However, the configuration described below provides a server that provides far better performance.

A default install of Ubuntu only enables the standard Ubuntu-supported software sources. This is a relatively small subset of software packages that Ubuntu has hand picked to include in their distribution.

However, there are tens of thousands of packages for Linux available, and they can be made available for you to install by modifying your software sources list.

There are serveral ways to do this:

The built in font-hinting support in Ubuntu sometimes does not work very well with specific fonts. The following bit of code in your ~/.fonts.conf can disable hinting for specific fonts.

<match target="font">
    <test name="family" qual="any">
      <string>UmePlus P Gothic</string>
    </test>
    <edit name="hinting">
      <bool>false</bool>
    </edit>
</match>

Replace "UmePlus P Gothic" with the name of your font.