Penguin
Recent Changes

Changing the GNOME default WebBrowser

To change the browser that fires up when you click on links in various GNOME applications, just change the default browser in the GNOME control center (you can bring up the panel in question directly by running gnome-default-applications-properties). Enter something like opera "%s" or mozilla "%s" in the Custom Web Browser box.

Changing the GNOME2 WindowManager

GNOME 1.4 has a capplet for changing window manager. In GNOME 2.x, you can change it

  • Per user: $ gconftool -s /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/default -t string /usr/bin/sawfish
  • System wide: edit /usr/share/gnome/default.wm (maybe)

If the above fails because you have a previously saved session with metacity, then loading the Gnome Session manager, deleting 'Default' and then adding a new 'Default' seems to allow sawfish to start.

According to Twisted Radix, this doesn't work on GNOME 2.12+.

Edit or create /.gnomerc and add "export WINDOW_MANAGER=sawfish" (or whatever) to it.
Apparently Gnome 2.12 (and hence Ubuntu Breezy) decided to stop supporting the /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager entry in gconf. The key says "This key has been deprecated since GNOME 2.12", but what they mean is "broken", not "deprecated" (from what I can tell).

Various Power toys for tweaking hidden Gnome preferences

http://live.gnome.org/PowerUserTools

Filenames with + signs are not completely selected on Double Click when using gnome-terminal(1)

Using the default gnome-terminal(1) settings when double clicking on a filename containing a + character, only the portion of the filename up to the + is selected. This can get incredibly annoying!

Fortunately there is a very simple fix, right click on your terminal, choose 'Edit Current Profile', Add + to the end of the "Select-by-word-characters' text box, Close.

My GNOME top panel is missing

To revert to the default panel configuration:

gnome-session-remove gnome-panel
gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/panel
gnome-panel &

Found at http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10675.