When typing "d" mimimizes all your windows with a remote desktop

published Dec 31, 2010 05:51 by admin ( last modified Dec 31, 2010 05:51 )

Of all strange things that happens to a user in Linuxland, having all windows mimize whenever you type the letter "d" while in a VNC session, has been one of the strangest.

A surprising number of Linux commands and programs, python code and Swedish and English words contain the letter "d", so the situation quickly gets untenable.

It turns out that on Ubuntu 10.10 the keyboard shortcut for mimimizing all windows is spuriously set to "d" plainly and simply, when accessing the desktop over VNC. A theory is that this happens because a key that normally is used in combination with d (meta) to mimimize the windows, is not found over VNC and the desktop simply sets the shortcut to "d".

The remedy is to rebind the minimize all windows action to another key combination in System->Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts .

I chose Windows + m.

See: Comment #3 : Bug #655886 : Bugs : “tsclient” package : Ubuntu