Quite a few applications use ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel to keep track of a user’s most recent files. Unfortunately, not every application offers customization options to disable this list.
One possible solution, granted, a quite hacky one, is to clear recently-used.xbel and revoke a user’s permission to edit it again.
First, remove and re-create the file to clear it
$ rm -f ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
$ touch ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
You can then edit the permission so that the user can’t edit the file any more.
$ chmod -w ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
For KDE, there is quite a similar mechanism. While there is no single file that stores the recently used items, a .desktop file is created in ~/.kde/share/apps/RecentDocuments/ for every item.
If if you revoke a user’s writing permission to that folder, KDE won’t add any item to the ‘recently used’ list.
$ chmod -w ~/.kde/share/apps/RecentDocuments/
Due to a bug in GDM there currently is now way of preventing GDM from playing a sound when you login to your Fedora 11 box. This is especially annoying on notebooks, e.g. when you’re sitting in a meeting or in a (quiet) public place like a library.
The only workaround (a bit dirty, granted) is to delete or rename the sound file:
# cd /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/
# mv bell.ogg bell.ogg-bak
Enjoy reclaimed silence!
Update: There is a workaround in bugzilla that gets by without deleting or renaming any files.
To login a certain user automatically at boot time, you have to change the daemon-section of your /etc/gdm/custom.conf:
[daemon]
TimedLoginEnable=true
TimedLogin=you
TimedLoginDelay=0
With ‘TimedLogin’ being a valid, non-root user and ‘TimedLoginDelay’ being the login delay in seconds.
An overview of available configuration variables can be found on live.gnome.org
It’s possible to define keyboard shortcuts for your own commands in addition to the predefined Gnome actions. Since metacity is Gnome’s default window manager, you have to edit the metacity keys in your GConf configuration system. The easiest way is doing it with the gconf-editor (although you can of course edit the xml-definition in ~/.gconf/apps/metacity/ by hand).
So open your gconf-editor and navigate to the tree ‘/apps/metacity/global_keybindings’. Assign a shortcut to one of the keys run_command_1 to run_command_12, e.g. Alt + F9.
Now you have to tell metacity, which command to run. In the corresponding key run_command_1 to run_command_12 under ‘/apps/metacity/keybinding_commands’ you specify the command that you want to attach to the shortcut.
An Example: We want to start xmms when XF86AudioPlay is pressed, so we have to alter the keys as follows
/apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command1 = XF86AudioPlay
/apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command1 = xmms -t
Of course, this only works with the default windows manager metacity. If you use a composition-manager like Compiz or Beryl, your mileage will vary.
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