roadmr's questions

Unity (I'm using Ubuntu Trusty if it matters) has these very handy shortcuts where you can press ctrl+alt+numpad to place a window in one of 8 predetermined positions. For instance, ctrl+alt+7 will place the window in the top left quarter of the screen, resizing it appropriately. ctrl+alt+8 will place the window in the top half of the screen, maximizing horizontally; similarly, ctrl-alt-4 will place it in the left half, maximizing vertically.

This makes it very easy to "tile" windows in a non-overlapping fashion and is a huge time-saver for arranging windows.

Sadly, these shortcuts are almost unusable on compact laptops (i.e. without a numpad, so basically everything under 15" screen size), as they lack a dedicated numpad. Some have an "overlaid" numpad, accessible by some arcane key combination, which makes things very cumbersome as the sequence becomes "enable keypad - place window - disable keypad". Some others simply lack numpad functionality.

Is there a way or alternative shortcut for Unity to use on these systems? I'm thinking something using the Super key which is already used extensively by Unity, but I couldn't find such feature.

When I type something in Thunderbird's search bar, the first item that pops up is a Bing search for that term. Is there a way to remove Bing? I don't really need Thunderbird to be able to search the web.

So just removing it and leaving nothing is acceptable, but replacing it with, say, Google (or anything that's not Bing) works as well. I perused all the settings dialogs and preferences and couldn't find anything of the sort.

I know I can install Samba or openssh-server to be able to share files between two Ubuntu computers. Is there a way to share files without installing additional packages?

I installed Ubuntu on two systems on the same LAN, but without Internet connectivity. I found that my usual way of transferring files (scp) failed because openssh-server was not installed on either system. Using Personal File Sharing was impossible without installing extra packages. I ended up using netcat to transfer, which is suboptimal and not intuitive for the average user.

So I'd like to know if anyone knows of a way to do this with out-of-the-box Ubuntu installations (or at least, with packages available in the Ubuntu desktop CD).

Thanks!