weeve.org

Despite the options in the System Settings dialog for Keyboard Shortcuts, there are still several keybinds that are set outside of this. While you can set a keybind in the Keyboard Shortcuts screen, the pre-existing ones seem to take precedence, so the ones you defined don’t do what you’d like them to do.

As mostly a reminder post so I remember where they live each time I redo a system, here’s how to find the one(s) that  define keybindings I want to use (here’s looking at you Alt+F6):

1. Install the dconf-editor package via the command:

   sudo apt-get install dconf-editor

2. Open dconf-editor (when using Cinnamon, you should be able to search for it in the menus).
3. Go to org > cinnamon > muffin > keybindings and adjust/remove the key bindings that conflict with the ones you set.

You may need to log out and log back in at this point to get the keybind to work (or run the command cinnamon –replace in a terminal).

This topic may seem like an odd thing to want and try and do, but for the machines I use that have wireless, I don’t want it enabled by default.  One is a desktop that just has a wireless network adapter to run Kismet and the other is a work laptop that spends 99% of it’s time with a wired connection plugged in.

While I enjoy the ease of Ubuntu’s ease of configuring wireless, there is actually no easily exposed setting to keep Network Manager from enabling wireless networking when you login.  After much digging, I found an answer here, but it’s not very elegant.

If you scroll down to what is currently the second to last post, you’ll find a post by tp42 talking about how to use the dbus-send command to make this happen.  The actual command itself is:

dbus-send --system --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.Set string:org.freedesktop.NetworkManager string:WirelessEnabled variant:boolean:false

The post goes on to detail how to add it into the commands that get run when you log into the default Ubuntu desktop session.

Ideally, this should be a setting you can easily configure so you don’t have to run a command to disable it when you log in, but it does get the job done.

Having recently dual-booted my main desktop system with Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit, I decided to setup virt-manager to handle KVM virtual machines.  While I don’t have a current use for VMs other than to play around with things as I run into them, I wanted them to be able to talk to other physical machines on my network w/o adding another hop into my internal network.

Therefore, I needed bridging such that virtual machines were assigned IPs (statically or dynamically) in the same subnet as my main desktop. To do this, I followed steps 2.1 and 2.2 from KVM Networking – Community Ubuntu Documentation guide.

Once I did this, everything seemed happy.  However, I noticed that the default bridged network of 192.168.1.x and the default bridge interface virbr0 were still being created, even after restarting libvirtd.  Additionally, this was causing dnsmasq to be started on the system.  With the bridging method I’m using,  there’s no need for that since the virtual machines can reach the name server on my network.  A little more research showed that essentially both problems here were the result of the symlink /etc/libvirt/qemu/networks/autostart/default.xml . Once I removed that, libvirtd was no longer using them, but it hadn’t shut them down.  A little brctl and kill love and all was well again in the universe. :)