Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

Yesterday I installed the newest Ubuntu on my machines. The upgrade went smoothly, there were no problems. I collect here my notes about this new release.

If you want to upgrade several machines, read this post. With this “trick” you can reuse the downloaded packages on other machines too.

Unity redefines F10. As I use Midnight Commander a lot, it’s quite annoying as F10 means “quit” in MC. A workaround is to use ESC + 0 in MC, but that’s a PITA. Also, I assigned something to F10 in vim… Here is how to disable F10 in Unity: (1) install compizconfig-settings-manager and start it, (2) filter “unity” and start the Ubuntu Unity Plugin, (3) edit “Key to open the first panel menu” and disable it. Now everything is back to normal.

With CTRL + ALT + T you can start a new instance of your default terminal emulator. I use terminator, so here is how to make it the default: click on the power button in the top right corner and choose “System Settings”. On the left side at the bottom you will see “Set Preferred Applications”. Start it, and under the System tab specify your favorite terminal emulator.

Want to monitor the RAM / CPU usage? Execute the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexeftimie/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install indicator-sysmonitor
indicator-sysmonitor &

I use this customized output: “| CPU: {cpu} | RAM: {mem} |”. To edit it, right click on the applet and choose Preferences.

Is the Dropbox indicator applet gone? Here you will find a fix.

Missing the weather indicator? Execute “sudo apt-get install indicator-weather“. (via webupd8)

Unity wallpapers with shortcuts: here.

After playing one day with Unity, I found one thing very frustrating: there is no bottom panel for the applications, so I never know what programs are running. I noticed that I was pressing ALT + TAB a lot… I was already thinking of switching back to Ubuntu Classic when I could figure out how to get the bottom panel back. You just need to launch “gnome-panel” and customize the new panel. Add it to your startup applications, this way it will be launched each time you log in. It also added a top panel that I removed (right click, delete). Customization: right click and add “Window List” and “Workspace Switcher”. Since this is a classic panel, you can add all those applets that are missing in Unity, for instance the “System Monitor”.

If you find the global menu (File, Edit, etc. are on the top panel like in MacOS) annoying, here is how to get rid of it (via webupd8):

sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk indicator-applet-appmenu indicator-appmenu

Log out and log back in to take it into account. (edit: same thing in 11.10)

Under Eclipse I had a strange problem. Sometimes it crashed with the error message “The program ‘Eclipse’ received an X Window System error.” I found the solution here. In short, I had two xulrunner instances on my system, versions 1.9.1 and 1.9.2. Fire up Synaptic and remove 1.9.1.

With Firefox, I also had some strange problems. I couldn’t drag and drop an URL from the location bar to the Bookmarks. Or, sometimes the popup menu activated with the right mouse button disappeared when I moved the mouse pointer above it. The following command solved these problems:

sudo apt-get remove firefox-globalmenu

If you don’t like the new overlay scrollbars, here is how to get rid of them:

sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar liboverlay-scrollbar-0.1-0

This tip is from here.

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