My five must-have settings for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

  • 3) Show Desktop
    Show desktop is a nice feature in Compiz, it makes all windows disappear, if you move your mouse to a certain position on your desktop. The default region, that makes all your windows disappear from your desktop, is the region below your panel at the bottom of your screen.
    Don’t know what kind of weed the guys, who are responsible for this default setting, smoked – but they have for sure to change their dealer.
    This position is so sick, because you just can’t imagine how often you come by accident to the bottom of your screen.

    The best position, if figured out for me, is the top left corner of the desktop.
    Well – finding this setting took me half an hour, since Compiz offer a Show Desktop feature somewhere else, too.But this setting is done in the General Options(!) menu, in the Key bindings tab. Look there for a Show desktop caption with a little screen symbol. Hit the bottom to the right, which is labeled Bottom. A window pops up, and you can choose a new region on the symbolic desktop. Deselect the old one. The green color stands for “selected” the red one for “not selected”. You may get an conflict, because Compiz is using a certain region on the screen for other purposes, but you’ll be told that. Just choose something else.

    Also in 4) General Options in the CampizConfig Setting Manager you can try and set in the tab Display Settings the Sync To VBlank check box.
    I was hoping my tearing while H.264 playback will go away, but it didn’t. May be one of you out there have more luck.

  • 4) Active Desktop Borders
    The time I’ve stated using Ubuntu and Compiz, I remember that I could move windows over the edge of the screen, and if I kept moving it far enough, my rotating cube kicked in, and I could move the whole window onto the new screen.
    In the past I was missing this feature, but didn’t really was motivated enough to start my studies on the Internet in order to find a solution.
    Now, where I started my endeavor to get rid off this very annoying Show Desktop problem, I stumbled over this setting accidentally.

    In order to enable this feature again, you have to start System Settings from the Start panel, and choose Window Behavior. Go to the tab Advanced , and select the radio button Only when moving windows. That’s it.

  • 5) Screen Edge
    KDE’s Plasma panel will certainly be a miracle to me until the next ice age, but never the less I’m trying to harness this cross-grained little fellow.
    The first thing which is an absolutely must to me, is to set the Desktop into Folder View again, like is was over the last 100 years. Yes I’m very conservative, or just getting old ;-).
    Right-click onto your Desktop and select Folder View Settings from the menu. In Location select the radio button Show the Desktop folder.

    The second thing is, and you all may find it obvious as apple pie, how to make the KDE panel go over both screens.
    Here we go: Select on your panel on the very right side this yellow half-Yin-and-Yang symbol/icon ( the one who know how it is called, pls let me know) with a right mouse click. In the menu choose Panel Settings. And now comes the trick: The black bar which have appeared over the panel has in the middle of it a button labeled “Screen Edge”. Take this button, keep the left mouse button presses, and drag it into your second screen, where you want also to have this panel be available.

    This guys _is_ rocket science – Unbelievable – isn’t it? 😉

PS: Cheese Webcam Booth still doesn’t work properly. Hey – what about removing this from the repo in general?

5 thoughts on “My five must-have settings for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

  1. Nice guide!
    I fail to install nvidia drivers though. I get:

    W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net jaunty Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 3B22AB97AF1CDFA9
    W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

    I have tried to run apt-get update, but it doesn’t do anything. How do I continue?

  2. @cewan
    do the following to add a trust for this site.


    sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0x643dc6bd56580ceb1ab4a9f63b22ab97af1cdfa9

    I usually don’t do this, because if all works smooth on performing “aptitude update” on the command line, I tend to believe I do have an ‘clean’ (unmodified) sources.conf. You can always install packages also from untrusted parties, simple by manually grant the process by typing a ‘y’, if being asked.

  3. You don’t have to manually edit Xorg.conf, you can also install the “dontzap” package and then run the command:

    dontzap –disable

    To clarify, you want to have the DontZap option in Xorg.conf to say “false” instead of “true” (as you have in your example code). Ie. you want to have the feature off.

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