Working in the backyard

Today, possibly the last somewhat warm day of the year, I decided to sit out in the backyard t work.

Halfway through, I started making system tweaks.

The first is one I've been afraid of. From the terminal running:

xfce-settings-show

I don't know why, but I got the impression that running this application was some sort of "forcefully switch to advanced mode" crazyness. Nope. Instead, it's merely the real configuration tool, akin to the control panel on Windows. Hidden away from you by Acer/Linpus.

From here I was able to make 2 big fixes. I enabled the right click menu (Desktop/Behavior/show desktop menu on right click), which means I can now right click on the desktop to access all this great stuff. The stock user interface I already went through the trouble of editing to include my apps is there, just now I can do more.

Next I switched the Keyboard Map to "default" instead of "emacs" (Keyboard Preferences). What this means is I can now use CTRL+A to select all. Before, it I have no idea what it used to do. Now it's normal.

No idea why that isn't a stock setting. Oh well.

From the Keyboard Preferences tool, it seems I can set up shortcut keys to launch applications, or perform actions. Oooh! If I think of any, I'll be back. :D

More key settings can be found in the User Interface config panel too.

This was followed by a minor change to firefox (about:config), to disable disk caching.


Then lame old me came back inside because it got cold out. :)


And now that I'm back on the desktop, I'm making one more.

From here, the Synaptics touch pad driver has a feature that'll disable itself as you type. As suggested, I started by adding a small shell script block to the end of my "/home/user/.bashrc" file.

However, this is probably not the best solution, as the author of the tip mentions later (haha, after I already made the change).

After commenting out the previous suggestion, I followed the later instructions. From the terminal running (NOT as su/root):

xfce4-autostart-editor

And adding an application.

Synaptics Daemon
/usr/bin/syndaemon -i 1 -d

I made the mistake of runnig this as root, which I'm guessing added this to the root account, but I always start as user.

I also took this opportunity to remove a pair of autoupdate tasks from the list. There's a few more tasks here (compiz, print queue, Acer Task Queue, services no wait) that I'll to do some investigating in to. Might be able to shave off some boot time with these.