Tags: gui | tips | ubuntu

Well it looks like the Great Lucid Button Controversy is still raging. And now the Beta for Ubuntu Lucid has now been released. While I think its looking good, there's a few people out there who still prefer their Window Controls on the right-hand side of windows, where they were obviously intended. Luckily, Ubuntu being Linux, its quite easy to move them back. The procedure is the same as for Karmic 09.10. See below for details...

As with Ubuntu Karmic, enter this to start the editor:

gconf-editor

And then navigate via the left-hand tree to app -> metacity -> general, and find the control that says Button Layout". It should look like this:

Then simply switch "maximize,minimize,close:" to ":maximize,minimize,close". The ":" represents the Title Bar of the window and moving this to the left will make the buttons appear to the right. Doing so will give you:

What is important here is the location of the ":", and this can be anywhere. You can play around with it and make some quite funky/crazy button placements:

This one of the things I find great about Ubuntu, and Linux in general. The endless way you can set it to work how you work, rather how some UI lab in a far-off country tells you should... Obviously, all this might change by the time we get to the actual release of Lucid, but its a great workaround...!

Incidentally, I'm using the Testdrive App to try out Lucid here. To get hold of this, use:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:testdrive/ppa &&  sudo apt-get 
update &&  sudo apt-get install testdrive

Its a great way to try out new Ubuntu releases without having to either re-install everything or even do a reboot to run the live disk....

So far Lucid is looking great, and I thinks is going to be great evolution of the Ubuntu distribution. Well done to all the teams concerned...!