Here is how I configure my Alt+Print Screen action for taking window screenshots:

First, install gconf-editor if you don’t have it already:
$ sudo aptitude install gconf-editor

Then, open gconf-editor with this terminal command:
$ gconf-editor

Navigate to:
/apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_screenshot

Change the ‘command_window_screenshot’ value to:
gnome-screenshot --interactive --window --delay=1 --include-border --border-effect=shadow

Now when you use Alt+Print Screen to capture a screenshot of a window, you will get a nifty little drop shadow behind your image by default. See the example below.

Check out linuxalt.com.

Welcome to the Linux Alternative Project (formally the Linux Equivalent Project). The goal is to provide an informational and available website for all linux users. The website is currently in beta form. I will be periodically updating the database with Windows software and the Linux equivalents and alternatives.

In Ubuntu, you can use the SMB protocol (Server Message Block), a.k.a ‘Samba’, to share folders from your Ubuntu Linux workstation with Microsoft Windows workstations on your network.

I use SMB to share folders between my Ubuntu workstation and my Windows XP virtual machine in VMWare Server. Note that other virtualization products, such as VMWare Workstation and VirtualBox, come with this feature built-in.

In my virtual machine, I have the ethernet card set to ‘Bridged’ so that it connects to my physical network and is assigned an IP address from my router, as opposed to sharing the IP address from the Ubuntu host using NAT. You will need to know the Workgroup that the Windows XP machine is in. You can find this by going to Control Panel -> System and clicking on the Computer Name tab. You will see the Workgroup identified there.

Now, in Ubuntu, click System -> Administration -> Shared Folders. This will prompt you for your sudo password. If this is your first time visiting this control panel, it may prompt you to install SMB and NFS support, which you should do. Once that is finished, you will be presented with the Shared Folders applet. Click Add, choose the Path to the folder you want to share, choose ‘Windows networks (SMB)’, and enter the user name that you want to allow access to this share. You can also specify whether the user will have read-only access or read-write access. Click OK.

You are now sharing a folder. However, if you try to access the folder from Microsoft Windows at this point, you will be prompted for your password over and over again. The documentation in Ubuntu fails to tell you that you need to configure the user name that you want to use to access the share.  The default configuration requires users to enter a user name and password to access the share. You can do this from the command line:

$ sudo smbpasswd -a <USERNAME>

Replace <USERNAME> with the user name you want to access the shares. That command will respond with:

New SMB password:

Type the password you want to use, then confirm it. You should now be able to access the share via Windows with that user name and password.

In a Microsoft Windows environment, you might use an application like Daemon Tools, Alcohol, or the MS Virtual CD Control Panel to mount an ISO image so that it appears as a CD ROM drive in Windows Explorer. This allows you to access a CD/DVD image without burning it to a disc.

In Linux, you can do this via the command line. First, make a directory to mount the ISO file into. Then, execute this command from a terminal:

$ sudo mount -t iso9660 -o loop filename.iso /path/to/your/directory

The contents of that ISO will then be in that folder.

You can unmount that disc image with this command:

$ sudo umount /path/to/your/directory

Note that some disc images are NRG files, which is Nero’s file format. You can convert those to ISO format using a command line application called nrg2iso. First install it:

$ sudo aptitude install nrg2iso

and then convert the file with this command:

$ nrg2iso input.nrg output.iso

Also, some disc images are IMG files. You can simply rename the .img extension to .iso, and then mount the ISO file.

There is not an obvious way to disable the Recent Documents menu under the Places menu if you don’t want to use that feature. Here is how I do it:

Open a terminal window and execute these two commands:

$ rm ~/.recently-used.xbel $ mkdir ~/.recently-used.xbel

Replacing that file with a directory seems to be the only way to keep it from being populated.