I don't know what it is with the Ubuntu developers; they seem to be going out of their way to make their distribution as unpleasant to use as is humanly possible. If it wasn't bad enough that they slow it down by running the default desktop with pointless animations, and playing annoying drumbeats at boot time, they disable potentially useful features like menu tearoffs and then move everyone's titlebar buttons across to the left side, ignoring their previous defaults.
Here's a script to fix up these inanities:
#!/bin/sh
# Put the buttons on the right, where they should be
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout ":minimize,maximize,close"
# Disable annoying animations
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /desktop/gnome/interface/enable_animations false
# Give us back tear-off menus
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_tearoff true
# Kill that irritating drumbeat forever
sudo su gdm -c "gconftool-2 --type bool --set /desktop/gnome/sound/event_sounds false"
# Stop asking us if we want to empty the trash. Of course we want to.
gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/confirm_trash false
# Windows already have a maximise button, so do something useful with the titlebar double-click
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/action_double_click_titlebar toggle_shade
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