Fedora Linux

mouse.

Fedora's GNOME configuration contains a good set of keyboard shortcuts. To change shortcuts or add new ones, select the menu option System>Preferences>Keyboard Shortcuts, which displays the window shown in Figure 2-8.

Figure 2-8. GNOME Keyboard Shortcuts window

This window shows a number of actions on the desktop and the shortcut key for each. To change a shortcut, click on an entry. The shortcut for that entry will change to read New Accelerator. Press the key or key combination that you wish to use for that keyboard shortcut; if the shortcut is not already in use, it will be assigned to the selected action, and if it is in use, the conflict will be displayed in an error dialog.

To remove a keyboard shortcut, click on an entry, and then press Backspace.

If you have a 'multimedia' keyboard with keys for sound control and common applications, you can in most cases use those keys as shortcuts. However, the Keyboard Shortcuts window will show these keys as hexadecimal codes, as shown in the highlighted line in Figure 2-8. Not all keys can be used as shortcuts because some multimedia keyboards are internally divided to act as two separate keyboards, with multimedia keys being sent to a different output. In a few rare cases, the multimedia keys don't generate normal keyboard scancodes at all.

2.2.2. How Does It Work?

GNOME stores most of its configuration in hidden directories in each user's home directory. Most configuration options and settings are stored, using the Gconf system, in XML files located in ~/.gconf .

Themes consist of a large number of files, stored in specific directories according to the type of theme and whether the theme is installed for personal use or system-wide use, as shown in Table 2-2 . The GNOME theme configuration tools perform a personal installation of themes.

Table 2-2. Directories for themes and icons

Theme type	Personal installation	System-wide installation
Icon themes	~/.icons	/usr/share/icons/
Application/control and Window Manager themes	~/.themes	/usr/share/themes/

When a new user is created, the files and directories in /etc/skel are copied to the new user's home directory; you can include default configuration settings by placing them into that directory. For example, files in /etc/skel/.gconf are placed in ~/.gconf when a new account is created.

GNOME panels are managed by the gnome-panel program, and the desktop is managed by Nautilus.

2.2.3. What About...

2.2.3.1. ...making a theme available to all users?

After testing component themes, you can move them from your personal theme directories to the system-wide directories:

# mv /home/ yourusername /.icons/* /usr/share/icons/
# mv /home/ yourusername /.themes/* /usr/share/themes/
# chown -R root:root /usr/share/{icons,themes}

2.2.4. Where Can I Learn More?

? The GNOME desktop manual; press F1 in any GNOME application, select System>Help, or enter the command yelp.

? GNOME homepage: http://gnome.org

? freedesktop.org: http://freedesktop.org

2.3. Customizing KDE

Fedora's KDE defaults are altered from the original upstream developers' versioneven more so than GNOME is modified from its upstream version. For this reason, some die-hard KDE fans don't like working on a Fedora system.

Like GNOME, KDE can be tweaked, fiddled, and configured to look and work just the way you want.

2.3.1. How Do I Do That?