Science/Engineering/Technical forums

The new Ubuntu 10.04 is really nice, IMO, but there's this one odd thing about it -- they moved the window buttons to the left side, and once you've learned the other way, it's pretty frustrating.
Here is how to fix that:

open a terminal --
at the prompt type gconf-editor and a gui will pop up.
Navigate to apps->metacity->general in the tree view
Change the value of the button_layout to menu:minimize,maximize,close

You do that by double clicking the existing entry and you'll get an edit box to type into.

And that's it. I'm supposing you need to run gconf-editor from a terminal because you can really mess things up with it, kind of like with the windows registry, so most users shouldn't fool with it, and
it's not in the default application menus. This is one of the very few things you actually need a terminal for in this version, though you could add it to the gui menu if you were going to fool with it a lot.

So far, this seems to be the "hairy arm" or "naked lady" in this version -- everything else seems quite nice to me. I have now installed it in several machines, old and newer with nothing but having to tell it the language, timezone, and how much disk it can have, and everything from wireless to web-cams "just works".
I have heard you can have some troubles with huge files when upgrading from really old versions though -- YMMV, but I like these long term support versions, and may not upgrade my older "main" machine at all -- it "just works" too.

Thanks Doug,

I've got Ubuntu running in virtualBox from XP (I know, backwards from your point of view). Anyhow, easy fix and worked like a charm. Perhaps now I can do something more with perl than the stuff from windows seems to wanna let me do.

Thanks!

Turns out gconf-editor has a few more tricks. While learning gtk2+ from a tutorial, I found this one out. Buttons can have nifty stock icon pix on them, but you don't get them unless you apply the following fix supplied by one of the other students:

Fix for no icons on buttons in glade/gtk apps:
if you have missing images in stock buttons, even with the warnings when launching try this:

1. Open gconf-editor
2. Browse to dektop/gnome/interface
3. Check "buttons_have_icons"

Worked for me!!!
Found it here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/498473