What is the command line equivalent to <application> on the menu? You will often find the name of the program in the About box of the program. If not, use the menu editor, available from Programs Settings Menu editor . The command line equivalent is that contained in the Command box. What is the command line equivalent to <application> on the panel? Right-clicking on the application in question will give you an option of Properties in the menu which appears. Looking at that will tell you the command to start it from a terminal. It's the line prefaced by Command. I have a slow machine. How can I speed GNOME up? There are a number of things you can do to speed up GNOME: If you don't usually use the applets or applications which start automatically when you start GNOME (deskguide, clock, help browser, file manager), then get rid of them. In the control center you will find a section called Startup Programs. You can attempt to identify the ones you don't need by picking them from the list of Browse running sessions and clicking on Remove. Don't remove gnome-smproxy, panel, or gmc, unless you know what you're doing. If this is too complicated, you can also simply press the "kill button" on the apps which started (typically the help browser and the file manager), or right-click on applets and select Remove, and then remember to save the session when you log out. If you use themes, don't use pixmap themes. Pixmap themes are the ones which have a lot more detail, background which is shaded in varying colours, or lots of pictures in them. Some of them can be very heavy on a slow machine because they are more complicated to draw. Engine themes (non-pixmap) themes include: default, (the default, yes :)), metal, notif, redmond95, thinice, clean and xenophelia. Guillermo S. Romero adds to this the following observation: Derived (aka take one of above and change colors, or combine two of above engines): Basic, Blue-and-Gray, CoolIce, Coolness, ForestGreen, Turismo, Scalpel, buffyEro (buffy engine), buffyIno (buffy engine), buffyMagic (buffy engine), buffyNess (buffy engine), buffyRio (buffy engine). So you have 18 acceptable themes in the basic package. and gives more details of how to distinguish them and find ones whose speed is acceptable to you in a post to gnome-list. Investigate different window managers. Sawfish and WindowMaker are both thought by their users to be generally very light and zippy, as is Enlightenment if you turn all the fancy options off. If you don't want to change your window manager, have a look at the options for the window manager itself, and turn off anything that needs a lot of effort to redraw: complicated pictures, animations, transparent window moving. If you use window manager themes, again, pick a simple one. For moving and resizing, a light option is "boxed". Keep menu images in memory. To achieve this, right-click on an empty part of the panel and select Panel Global preferences . (This is the same as starting the control center and selecting the Panel section.) Then select the Menu section and find the Keep menus in memory checkbox and ensure it is selected. Turn off menu icons with the control-center. You'll need to restart GNOME for this to take complete effect. Turn off panel animations with the control-center. If you use gnome-terminal, consider avoiding the pixmap and transparent background options. The shaded transparent background option in particular can slow things down. I looked at the memory used by GNOME. It uses loads, and even killing things off doesn't free it up! Help! This is not a bug. This is standard UNIX behaviour. You have been using the monitor applets or gtop, right? And looking at "Mem" or some similar title? You don't want that. For a start, most of that total is from shared libraries. Further to that, UNIX keeps information from programs in memory for a while after they have been killed, in case they are needed again. If something else is started and needs that space, that's when it gets rid of it. In addition, you are probably looking at the wrong sort of memory :) There is an excellent document on memory use in GNOME and in UNIX which explains about shared libraries and their uses and how to work out how much memory something is really using which lives in GNOME CVS. You can browse it at http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/white-papers/MemoryUsage/MemoryUsage.txt. It's probably worth mentioning that there are one or two applications notorious for eating memory, both within and without GNOME. One common example is leaving Netscape open for a long time. Changing themes over and over again in the clock applets has been known to have a similar effect. Solution: don't cycle through the themes madly, and if you can reliably reproduce a memory leak, please submit a bug report. I have a two-button mouse. What's this "middle-click"? X has long assumed that mice have many buttons (it can cope with at least five). You don't normally need more than three, although Quake players may disagree. To simulate a middle-click on your two-button mouse with XFree86, try "chording": click both buttons simultaneously. This should work. If it does not, you may have to edit your XF86Config file (make a backup copy of it first. This is not a file to make mistakes in). to ensure there are uncommented lines which say "Emulate3Buttons" and "Emulate3Timeout 50". A commented line has a hash (#) symbol at the start of either line. To uncomment the line, remove the hash sign from the start of the line. You will need to restart X for this to take effect. Commercial and proprietary versions of X may differ: an example is that this is set in the Exceed version of X by selecting middle button emulation in the input configuration dialog box. PgUp and PgDn don't work in gnome-terminal. Yes, they do. You need to hold down the Shift key as well for them to work, that's all. Devin Carraway adds, The unshifted version of these keys are frequently used by programs such as mailreaders. gnome-terminal, like xterm just tries to stay out of your way. How do I disable that annoying "Warning! You are running as root!" message? Just get an up-to-date copy of the code in question, investigate what generates the message, tweak the code to remove it, recompile it, and you're done. If that doesn't look helpful, then it's because it's not meant to be. That warning is there for a reason. Running as root should be reserved for system administration tasks only, and this does not include recataloguing your jpgs, chatting on IRC, or playing with Napster. It's a security risk, and it's very easy to have accidents as root and remove things you didn't mean to. Running as a normal user is safer and more sensible. It is assumed that people who can remove the message are the people who won't normally be running as root in the first place. But then how can I run helix-update, gnome-linuxconf, the menu-editor, or programs which monitor logfiles that root can read and my normal user can't? As your normal user, open a gnome-terminal. Type su - and give the password. That is now a root shell where you can run such commands by typing them at the command line. You will not be able to run graphical apps, though. If you are going to need graphical apps, then use ssh. Install openssh and then you can do ssh localhost and then su -. You can then start graphical apps as root from that window and have them displayed on your screen. If you don't have openssh, then consider getting it. The alternative way to do this is to allow any user to write to your X session and then become root, and run graphical apps as above. Allowing any user on the local machine to write to your X session is not always a great idea. You would do it with xhost +localhost and then turn it off with xhost -localhost, but the ssh method is better. If you make a lot of use of this, you should consider installing the package called sudo, which allows you to let non-root users do root things under tight controls. Note that you can run helix-update without being root if you are using a recent (post-May 2000) version of it on Red Hat, Linux Mandrake, TurboLinux, or LinuxPPC. Run it as a user, and it will prompt you for the root password. MIME types seem to be broken unless I run the file manager as root. This question needs an answer. Still. I can't change window manager from Enlightenment to WindowMaker using the control-center. It's a bug, yes. It's been reported under several distributions. You can generally manage it by changing to something else first and then changing again, or by experimenting with the Try and OK buttons. Different people report success with different combinations of those. The control-center is undergoing a rewrite and with luck the new version will improve on this. How do I change the font in GMC (the file manager)? Sorry. You can't do this currently. GMC will eventually be replaced by Nautilus, and so new features are not being added to GMC. Bug-fixes only. Since I (Telsa) wrote that, some inventive folks on gnome-list have come up with ways to do this. It is not, unfortunately, a matter of being able to select something with the mouse; it requires editing configuration files by hand and then restarting either GNOME or GMC. Some people won't want to get into this, but if you want to try, have a look at these two suggestions: What changes to make to the file(s) (It's not specified, but the range you can change the numbers in is from 0.0 to 1.0.) What to do with the file(s) them Also check out the rest of that thread.