3D Acceleration in VirtualBox

When adding the VirtualBox Guest Extensions to a VM running Linux, make sure that you have 3D acceleration enabled in the VM's settings before you install them. If you do not, the extensions will be compiled without the acceleration and you won't get the benefit thereof. I was pleasantly surprised to see that recent Linux distributions will dynamically size their desktops to the window size of the VM once the extensions are properly installed.

How to Change the GDM 2 Background

In the past, Gnome GDM's appearance could be changed with themes. This was changed when GDM was rewritten for Gnome 2. GDM now uses gconf and the keys are documented in the Gnome Library. At first I was having little luck with these as I was naively running gconftool-2 as root. You have to run the gconftool-2 as gdm:

sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 -t str -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /full/path/to/your/background.png

How to Restore Control-Alt-Backspace in Red Hat Derived Distros

The disabling of Ctrl-Alt-Backspace has finally made it into Red Hat Enterprise and derived distributions as of RHEL 6.0. To restore it without having to resort to GUI clikery, add this to /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc-common:

setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp