FOSSwire

So, that proprietary 3D graphics driver you installed is now causing you some problems, so you got rid of it. But there's a problem. Your KDE 4 installation had those fancy desktop effects enabled, which now aren't working. Instead of a KDE desktop, you have a nice white screen.

There is an easy keyboard shortcut you can use from within KDE to quickly toggle the desktop effects on and off if you have a problem with them which causes KDE to be unusable.

Simply press Alt-Shift-F12.

Note that this only toggles the setting for that session only. If you want to turn the setting permanently off, you must then go into System Settings > Desktop > Desktop Effects.

I haven't verified this tip in KDE 3, but it may well work. Please do post a comment if you can confirm or deny this.

UPDATE: that would be F12, not F2. Sorry! Thanks to Karper for pointing that out.

Getting a little bored with your titlebar? We all are at some point. While many know that you can change the look of the titlebar with a few clicks, few know that the individual buttons can be rearranged.

Woah now, you can change the order of the buttons? Yes, with a little help from GConf.

To start, open up GConf Editor (follow the link above to see how) and navigate to /apps/metacity/general. On the right pane, find the key button_layout.

The screenshot above describes the available options pretty well. The best way to find out what works is to simply try some:

This setting is also recognized by Compiz, so even if you have effects enabled you can still edit the titlebar the same way.

If you don't like your customizations, right-click button_layout and select Unset to have them reset to the default.