Click on any of the existing menus and then click on the “New Item” button:

Once you’ve filled out the above fields and have clicked on the “OK” button the option will be added to your menu. You can give the option an icon by clicking the icon on the top left of the dialog (this allows you to browse for a picture to use).

Keyboard Shortcuts screen

The screen that pops up should look like the one in the screenshot above. If you look through the existing shortcut keys you’ll see some useful defaults, such as <Control>+<Alt>+L to lock your screen. The keyboard shortcuts editor is user friendly, if you choose a combination that is already taken you will be warned like so:

Warning dialog

One of the programs that I tend to use a lot is the terminal, there’s a shortcut defined to run the terminal but it has no shortcut key assigned to it by default as you can see in the screenshot below:

Run in terminal is disabled

You can set the shortcut key by clicking on the row, which will change the text to “New shortcut…” and then press whichever key combination that you want to use, which in my case is <Control>+<Alt>+T:

Run in terminal set to ++T

Pressing <Control>+<Alt>+T now opens up a new terminal window, very convenient!

In addition to setting shortcut keys for existing actions, you can add your own by clicking the “Add” button, which gives the below dialog:

Add custom shortcut dialog

Say we want to run Firefox with a shortcut key, I’ll fill in the screen like so:

Filled in custom shortcut dialog

After clicking the “Apply” button the action is added to the category “Custom Shortcuts”:

Custom shortcut added

You can set shortcut keys to these new actions like standard ones. If you want to change the name of a custom shortcut key, simply click the name to get the dialog to change the name (which looks exactly like the add dialog, but with the current values pre-populated). For custom shortcuts the “Remove” button is enabled, which allows you to delete them (the default shortcuts can’t be removed). Note that custom shortcuts are removed without warning!

• Right click on a text file and choose “Open with Other Application” and select gvim from the list of applications
• Close the file that you are editing (unless you actually wanted to edit it)
• Open a terminal and go to ~/.local/share/applications and edit the file mimeapps.list, it will look something like this:

[Added Associations]
text/plain=gedit.desktop;gvim.desktop;openoffice.org-writer.desktop;

To make gvim your default simply re-order the list and put gvim.desktop as the first entry like so:

[Added Associations]
text/plain=gvim.desktop;gedit.desktop;openoffice.org-writer.desktop;

For these changes to take effect you will either have to restart Nautilus yourself by executing “killall nautilus” (which has the downside that your desktop will no longer work until you log out and back in), or just log out and log back in.

To be able to develop and test on such a VM I generally require it to be available as if it is on the network (per example via SSH, or my browser). Assuming that you have installed VirtualBox and that you know how to setup a VM already, I’ll briefly explain the specifics of setting up a VM that you can access as if it were on the network:

• When creating the VM give it two network adapters.
  • Adapter 1 setup as “NAT”, this gives the VM access to whatever network your computer is connected. This includes the internet if you’re connected to it, which can be useful to download OS updates or applications inside your VM (I often have VMs running Ubuntu, and the NAT adapter allows me to use apt painlessly).
  • Adapter 2 setup as “VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter”. This gives the VM an IP address within a private range, that only exists within your own computer.

When installing an OS on your VM, it is useful to give the it a static IP address for adapter 2. Having a static IP for each VM will allow you to connect to it using bookmarks instead of having to check what the IP of each VM is after it has started. Note that you do have to adhere to the IP range defined in the VirtualBox preferences for the host only adapter. You can find this information via the menu: go to “File” -> “Preferences”, go to the “Network” section and double-click on the host only adapter entry to get a popup where you can see/configure the network range and the DHCP server settings (you probably want to ensure that your static IPs cannot be given out by the host only adapter’s DHCP server).

Before you attempt such an upgrade yourself, be sure to make a backup of your Linode. If you have enough diskspace left with Linode, the easy way is to resize the image that you’re using for your server and then duplicate it. Alternatively you can download a copy of the image (which can be quite time consuming, depending on the size).

The Linode manager makes it easy to use different disk images with your Linode, so if you mess up then you can switch to the backup image and revert to the situation before the upgrade. Kudos to Linode for offering such an excellent service with such excellent tools!

In my case I needed to access a PPTP VPN, the package that Ubuntu has to do so is pptp-linux (if you need another type of connection you should search for the word vpn in the package manager). Installing that package does not add options to the network manager. While you could configure the VPN by hand (by editing configuration files somewhere in /etc, depending on the installed VPN client), an easier way is to install a plugin for the network manager, and then use the network manager’s GUI to configure your VPN connections and to control use of to those VPN connections. For the pptp-linux the network manager plugin package is network-manager-pptp.

I don’t intend to install Fedora again though, as I’m very pleased with Ubuntu

If you try to do this in Fedora you’ll quickly run into SElinux. This can easily be solved by specifying which java binary to use with Eclipse. You can do this by passing in -vm /path/to/java on the command line, or by adding this into the eclipse.ini file.

Another issue that you will have in both Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12 is that certain UI buttons seem unresponsive. When clicking one of those buttons the UI is unresponsive for a few seconds, and when it wakes up it appears as if you had never clicked that button. This is due to the fact that both Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12 ship with a new version of GTK, which contains a new feature which certain applications such as Eclipse can’t handle properly. The fix to this is quite easy, you can deactivate this new feature by setting the environmental variable GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS to 1 (or true). You can do this by creating a script that does this before starting Eclipse, that way you don’t have to turn off this feature entirely but just for Eclipse.

The Fedora and Ubuntu versions of Eclipse that you can install via the distros’ package managers don’t have this problem, most likely because these versions of Eclipse turn off this GTK feature somehow (perhaps in the same way that I have described above).

You can read more about the GTK story here: http://blog.export.be/2009/10/fixing-eclipse-for-ubuntu-karmic-koala-9-10/. Kudos to the author, without that article it would have taken me a very long time to figure this one out

When Fedora 12 was released I decided to give that a go. I have to say that like Ubuntu it is easy to install and works really well. Unfortunately though I noticed that I could install packages without root priviliges as written here: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/11/18/2039229/Fedora-12-Lets-Users-Install-Signed-Packages-Sans-Root-Privileges. To me that is just an unacceptable security risk. I realise that this is just a policy setting (that you can re-configure), but I’m just not too fond of these types of defaults…

So I decided to back to Ubuntu. Unfortunately installing the 9.10 release did not go without problems, mainly because I had used some old CD-R(W) discs. Once I had a good CD-RW disc installation was a breeze though. A friend told me that next time I should use a USB drive instead

Because I’m so happy with Ubuntu 9.10, I also installed it on my EEE PC 900… using a USB drive