Ubunty "registry"

Let me be clear about one thing: Among the various Linux distributions I've tried, Ubuntu is the one I like best (at the moment). I used to be a great fan of RedHat, as a simple, clean nice and well featured disto. At least the "simple" part went down the drain after 7.2. (One of the crappiest one was SuSe, which started out quite well. I liked the idea of having commercial forces supporting a free project, but unfortunately the distribution has become more and more awkward and the free/open support community more and more egg-headed.)

A few years ago I was thinking - if we're going for the "all GUI" approach anyway, why not Brunbuntu :) I've been mostly a happy-puppy with Brunbuntu since then, but only until something needs tweaking. Then it's not so damn funny anymore. One of the things I've been tearing my hair about lately is the network manager. If you think I'm just whining, try upgrading from Edgy to Jaunty Jackalope. Someone should be shot messing up such a vital thing as network management methinks. However, whence you've got it right its actually not that bad at all (I particularly like the concept of being able to assign different settings to the same wlan interface depending on which network you're logged into - really great!).

If you're actually stuck with this, look out for the article abot the Network Manager I'm about to write.

Some things in Debinan/Ubuntu repel me on a deeper level however. One of those is the the idea of mimicking the Windowze registry. How this common-point-of failure strategy found it's way into the Linux community is beyond my understanding.

Anywho, here comes a few hints if you're unlucky enough having to alter some Gnome application setting.

Instead of the usual Unix/Linux approach, Gnome aware programs store all their data in a sub directory called ~/.gconf

Another place to look is in /etc/xdg/, at least for the "autostart" part for some of the applets.

The "keys" are fortunately files which makes this at least somewhat bearable, if not understandable. The content of these "keys" are however in XML, which again is quite repulsive IMHO.

The program to use to manage the "keys" in this "registry" thingy is the Configuration Editor (gconf-editor), which is part of your distribution but which is not enabled in the menu. Run the Menu Editor (alacarte) from a shell and enable it and to make life a little bit easier.