Today a friend asked me how to change keyboard shortcuts in Nautilus, Gnome's file browser. He had looked at System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts and found no way to tweak them there.

I dug around and discovered that Nautilus's shortcut configuration is stored in the text file ~/.gnome2/accels/nautilus

A comment in the header of that file describes it as "an automated accelerator map dump". Does that mean I can edit it and have the changes stick?...

I'm sorry to say that the problems with Gnome's panels persist in Ubuntu 10.04 'Lucid Lynx'.

I've found on several different machines that it's all too easy for a change of monitor resolution, or some other tweak to xorg, to trigger an unresolvable ballsup in the top panel. The applet icons in the top panel get jumbled up, and even disappear.

Today I logged in to a freshly installed, rather than upgraded, Lucid system running in VirtualBox, and was greeted with an error...

My friend Isa has an Asus A6000 laptop she bought new about seven years ago. It is the mainstay or her communications and entertainment at home. It had Windows XP on it, which eventually got very slow due to cruft and malware.

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on it a year ago or so, leaving an NTFS partition in place, full of photos. (I tried upgrading to 9.10 when that came out, but couldn't make the wireless chip work with it, so downgraded again).

Isa has got on OK with Ubuntu,...

Like most people I have a keyboard with the extra keys that Microsoft introduced, and I like to set these up to do useful things for me in my KDE4 desktop.

At the moment my preference is to set the left key to bring up the often-used 'Run Command' dialogue, and the right key to pop down my Yakuake console.

However, typically if you go to System Settings > Keyboard & Mouse > Global Keyboard Shortcuts and try to set either of the Windows keys as custom shortcuts...

I'm installing Ubuntu on a Compaq Armada M300 laptop acquired as a cast-off from a client.

I tried the regular Jaunty 9.04 install disk, which failed while trying to boot into the live system, and also during the boot of the direct installer.

I then tried the alternate install disk. This failed while trying to enable the framebuffer. The screen slowly faded to white and back down to black, and stuck there.

For further amusement, I tried the netboot install....