When everything goes pear-shaped in Windows, which happens often, the immediate reaction is to use the three finger salute, that is, Control Alt Delete, to bring up the task manager. There is a ‘task manager’ in Ubuntu, called System Monitor, and alot of people would like if Control Alt Delete brought this up, and it can! Type these lines into the terminal:
gconftool-2 -t str --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_9 "<Control><Alt>Delete"
Then:
gconftool-2 -t str --set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_9 "gnome-system-monitor"
Now pressing control alt and delete together will open the System Monitor so you can kill any misbehaving processes!
Edit
I originally edited this post with 2 lines of code which i now realise binded the system monitor command to the delete key, i apologise if this effected you and i’ll post a fix as soon as i find one.
I found a website which details how you can edit the file needed, but its fairly technical, and wouldn’t be in the spirit of the blog to post it, ill simplify it and post it up soon
So, tell me why would you need a Control alt delete. We the mac users make fun of that awful setting but i guess ubuntu just wants to take place in it.
Well, i see what you mean, but i’m coming from the point of view of making Ubuntu less scary for the new, from Windows convert. If they know that old familiar Control Alt Delete will get them out of trouble, it helps
“We the mac users make fun of that awful setting” – I don’t really think its an awful setting (…well no worse than Alt+Command+Escape at any rate!) In a perfect world it wouldn’t be needed but this isn’t a perfect world! One example (which is the reason I enable this setting) is that if I play a game (in my case its the sims) in full screen and it crashes (note that sims crashes NOT wine, so no force quit box comes up) then what do I do? Well at the moment I have to restart X (ctrl+alt+backspace) and log in again or change to another shell (press Ctrl+Alt+F1 or whatever, log in and kill it). This way I can just open up system monitor and kill the offending program (or give it a higher or lower priority or what ever is necessary) – much quicker!
Anyway I just thought I’d add that reason and that if you are running compiz you will have to do the same to /apps/compiz/general/allscreens/options, but to be honest I use the gui, gconf-editor, mainly so I can have a play with the other options while I’m there
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When I paste the first command into my terminal I get:
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `
bash: syntax error near unexpected token ‘
Hmm, I seem to be getting censored here. the token is actually:
It may not work if you aren’t using gnome as your window manager, are you using KDE or Beryl?
I’m pretty sure I’m using GNOME. I’m using whatever the default is in ubuntu, it’s a pretty fresh install.
ok, I found this on the ubuntu forums.
The correct commands (or at least the ones that worked for me) are:
gconftool-2 -t str –set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_9 “Delete”
gconftool-2 -t str –set /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_9 “gnome-system-monitor”
at a glance the difference seems to be the extra – in front of set
the command daavid posted made the sysytem monitor come up whenever I pressed delete, not control + alt + delete. This happenes all the time and it was annoying, I had to search and delete it manually with ther terminal. Is there another way? and can anyone else confirm this?
Stupidly i never looked through the code he gave before posting it, sorry, if you look closly, you can see that it binds that particular command to the delete key:
gconftool-2 -t str –set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_9 “Delete”
Did the original code at the top of the post work for you?