Ubuntu 10.4 upgrade and reset metacity bindings.

I've updated my laptop to Ubuntu 10.4. The upgrade went very smoothly, and I'm pretty happy with it. I needed to upgrade to thunderbird3 as thunderbird2 was having trouble sending mail to my work email server -- 50 seconds of single thread blocking doing the AUTH calculation on each send had made it impossible to work with.

The metacity window manager configuration has been changed considerably: the minimize, maximize, close buttons have been moved from the right to the left, and reordered. Rather than adjust to these new settings, I modified the configuration to put them back where they were before. This is a good reminder that I should go back to my own window manager and config. I'm not sure what will be best for the laptop, I am very happy with ion, at least with the ideas behind it, it's kind of a pain to configure. I still haven't duplicated my ion1 settings in ion3. Now that the developer gave up on it and switched to windows (sigh), I'm not sure if I should move on.

How to change the metacity button layout: Edit the gnome config for apps/metacity/general/button_layout, which is a string describing the button locations. I have changed mine to menu:maximize,minimize,close. Using the gconf-editor tool, navigate to apps/metacity/general, then find the button_layout option. Changes are immediate. Invalid button names are silently ignored, to future proof against updated button names in later configurations.

Thanks to lifehacker and how to geek for tips. Check out the howtogeek article if you need a walk through for gconf-editor.