Task Manager, Windows Style

A lot of us (me included) that are windows expats, got used to seeing task manager by pressing the ol’ three finger salute <ctrl><alt><del>. So can we get the same functionality in Ubuntu/Gnome? (KDE has <ctrl><esc&gt Below are the very simple instructions for getting it setup.

Before you begin, make sure that you have the Gnome system monitor installed (sudo apt-get install gnome-system-monitor)

The following need not be run as root….just your normal login.

gconftool-2 -t str --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_9 "<control><alt>Delete"
gconftool-2 -t str --set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_9 "gnome-system-monitor"

That’s it, just press <ctrl><alt><del> and you should be done.

Dale

Little Problems

I love Ubuntu…Debian in general, but the Ubuntu distro is very well put together. By necessity, I have a Windows box at home, which is where I installed Edgy and Beryl. Well, apparently, my Windows install/master boot record, doesn’t like Grub….at all. I get periodic blue screens o death and my screen saver doesn’t work for whatever reason (unless I log out…odd) My system exhibited the exact same results during a previous install shortly before a hard drive failure, so I chalked it up to the bad drive. This drive is new and it is doing the EXACT same thing. I can only assume it’s Grub. I booted into the recovery console and ran fixboot and fixmbr to write a new master boot record, and thusly making Ubuntu inaccessible, hoping to rectify the issue. No luck. I still get the blue screens. So now, I have to figure out what to do about that. I think I’ll just add a second drive for Ubuntu……sadly, I’m writing this from my desktop using Windows. Any suggestions??

Dale

A Beryl of Monkeys

I have been tinkering and googling for ways to get beryl to run on my T40. I figured it should be at least somewhat capable of running it. I’ve seen posts where folks have it working, but alas, I just can’t get it to come up. It always shuts down the X server or just won’t launch the x server. So I punted. I have other boxes at home. One is a P4 2.4 or something like that with about a gig of ram or so. It has a matrox card in it. I installed Dapper and gave it a go. No luck there either. Crazy.  So I thought to myself “should I bite the bullet and put it on my beloved main desktop box?”. Granted the beloved box is a few years old and not as fast as some of today’s powerhouse systems. But it’s got plenty of ram and a cool Quadro 980 video card. What the hell. I downloaded the latest nvidia driver and got it installed. When I checked glxgears, I was getting something like 7000 fps. Wow, I thought, that should do it. I followed all the instructions for installing beryl and emerald-themes, rebooted, crossed fingers, opened terminal, typed beryl-manager, crossed fingers again, gently pressed enter and then…….beauty revealed itself. I love it. I mean it’s a lot of eye candy and some if ain’t all that necessary, but it is REALLY cool. The transparency that is actually transparent and not just a duplicate of the desktop background. The neat little wiggle when you move things around, the effects when  you minimize and maximize. Oh and the cube. I’ll admit that I thought the cube was stupid when I saw the screenshots. Once I used it, I started using multiple desktops more often. It really is nice. I’m learning some little trick about the interface all the time. If you stuff the mouse pointer in the upper right corner, you get thumbnails of all your open windows, similar to os x f9. Alt-Tab is pretty cool and a little 3d-ish. I can’t wait to get familiar enough with it to quit oogling at it and do some real work

Dale