Nasser's questions

I noticed this strange issue with unity. I am using 12.04. The desktop has 4 virtual desktops, which I can switch between using the 'workspace switcher' which is very nice.

But I noticed the following: When I have 2 instances of the same app (say 2 different firefox windows, or 2 different terminal windows), in 2 different virtual desktops, then I click on the icon for that application located on the launcher panel (the left long strip with icons on it), then I see the application comes into focus. Then when I click again right away (on the same icon on the launcher), then now all instances of this application that are open come into ONE view (may be on was on desktop 1, and the other was on desktop 3 for example) and then I can now click on the one instance window that I want to select to use.

This is all very nice actually.

But this does NOT work for all applications!

I just tried it, and it worked for firefox, and for gedit and for the gnome terminal.

I have one firefox window open in virtual desktop 1, and another window open in virtual desktop 2. I clicked once on the firefox icon, then again, and both windows came into the main desktop and I was able to select which one to use.

When I tried the same thing on dolphin file manager, which I also had 2 windows (instances) of it open in 2 different virtual desktops, this behavior did not happen. I clicked again, and nothing happened. Only one remained in focus. So I had to fo look for the second dolphin window the hard way.

It looks like some apps are supported by this feature and some are not.

How does one make it so that all applications are supported like this? This is a very handy feature. Is it a configuration item somewhere?

thanks

I did something silly I think.

I wanted to use dolphin as default file manager. So I used package manager (synaptic) to remove nautilus file manager (because Ubuntu makes it so hard to change the default file manager globally).

Now when I rebooted and wanted to login, I no longer see the Ubuntu unity desktop as an option to select from the menu at the login prompt. I only get into the gnome classical and gnome options.

I went back to package manager and reinstalled nautilus file manager, and rebooted, but still, when I get to login in screen, I do not see the unity desktop (no 2D option, nothing) it only shows 2 options, gnome and gnome classic. I tried both, but they are not the same as the original desktop I had which is unity, with the launcher on the left, and the dash thing, and the 4 desktops, etc...

(so confusing, so many desktops, and not even a way to find which desktop one is on at the time. Like right-click with the mouse on the desktop, should tell one, "you are using GNOME(classic)" or something.

Anyway, What do I need to do to get unity desktop? Do I need to reinstall 12.04? How? I am already on 12.04. I do not want to lose all the configurations I did.

I searched and not able to find a way to do this.

I find this very annoying. After installing 12.04, I keep getting these tooltip messages from all the applications I use. I want to remove this feature.

For example, now when I move the mouse to launcher near an icon, the toolip message (black background and white font) comes up. I do not want this to show.

I am using the default desktop after installing 12.04 (I think this is called unity).

Here is an answer that shows how to edit a configuration file to change the message itself. But I really want to disable this feature from all applications. Do I have to go edit configurations files to do this?

How can i edit tooltips for unity launcher icons

Here is a screen shot from my desktop showing a tooltip when using firefox. Such tooltips show up in every application I open !

You can see how annoying they are and they get in the way.

thanks

update:

I found a way to disable tooltip in firefox, using

about:config

and then search for the word tip and make it false.

I hope that I do not have to do this for each application that I use now. It seems every application I use have tooltips enabled on Ubuntu (such as gedit, Libre office software, thunderbird, etc...). On windows, I did not have this problem with these applications. I noticed these tooltips on these applications only on 12.04, that is why I thought it is a configuration feature on 12.04.

I thought there might be a global option to disable tooltips for all applications. May be there is not.

But the point remains, I'd really like to turn off these tooltips for the desktop itself. Like on the launcher and other places on the desktop.