Comments on: Quick and Easy Title Bar Button Side Switching in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)/9.10 (Karmic)

By: harm

harm — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 21:03:06 +0000

Isnt gconf-editor easier to use?

First thing i do after a fresh install is some tweaks on Ubuntu with gconf-editor. the gnome-panel (autohide size , time) the buttons and other stuff.

In gconf-editor scroll to metacity - general and see button layout.

By: Frank

Frank — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 03:15:25 +0000

Cool and swift. thanks

By: Trevor

Trevor — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:05:27 +0000

Ah, that’s better, thanks

By: vol7ron

vol7ron — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:43:40 +0000

Command didn’t work for me either, but I ran it as root. When I exited out of superuser, I ran it again and it worked correctly.

By: peter

peter — Mon, 10 May 2010 20:28:19 +0000

The command in the post will hide the menu (with options to move the window to another workspace etc). To get the menu back, do the following:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string menu:minimize,maximize,close

By: Spliff85555

Spliff85555 — Tue, 04 May 2010 06:33:22 +0000

Thank you very much, that helped immediately!

By: Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson — Sat, 01 May 2010 06:33:41 +0000

Thanks very much for this advice!

This tip worked extremely well for me, after changing the smart quotes to straight quotes. I prefer the Window Maker style of buttons, with the minimize on the left and close on the right, no maximize button. i can get that with the colon in the middle:

gconftool-2 --set “/apps/metacity/general/button_layout” --type string “minimize:close”

By: Dbdougla

Dbdougla — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:43:14 +0000

The problem is the “smart quotes” in the examples above. Instead of the slanted quotes, you must delete them and use regular, vertical ones.

By: Sparkie

Sparkie — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:22:37 +0000

@saeed
You don’t need the quotes. I got the same error message, but managed to do the switchover with the following code:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string :minimize,maximize,close

By: Victor

Victor — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:14:03 +0000

Obviously you can also find this setting in the graphical configuration editor: gconf-edit.

It’s just a one-character change, really. Put the colon to the left if you want buttons on the right, put the colon on the right if you want the buttons on the left. Bling bling!

By: cm

cm — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:09:39 +0000

I would recommend using Ubuntu Tweak instead. You can drag and drop the button positions and things are less likely to go wrong.

By: saeed

saeed — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:58:16 +0000

When i copied the cmd from your site i got the following error:

Error setting value: Bad key or directory name: ““/apps/metacity/general/button_layout””: Must begin with a slash ‘/’

when i copied it from ubunuforums, i got this error:

Error setting value: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Failed to get connection to session: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)

strange