No Way Know How

I've never had the function keys for brightness work on the HP 4340s - the icon comes on screen, but the brightness is unaffected . I found this: http://www.upubuntu.com/2013/04/fix-brightness-keys-not-working-on.html and did it, and it worked, but following boot the screen defaults to minimum brightness and has to be manually changed. So I followed advice here to install dconf-tools and set the backlight values there. I'm sure I could find the actual location of these values and do it without dconf, but that's a challenge for another day. For mint mate 17, you can set the default brightness by following steps: sudo apt-get install dconf-tools Applications -> System Tools -> dconf tools, search for backlight, find and change following options: brightness-ac : brightness when use AC powser (charged), brightness-dim-battery : brightness when use battery (not charged),

set -o vi to set bash to vim-like controls. will need to add it to . bashrc to make it persistent. strangely difficult to locate this nugget! http://www.sluse.com/view/15121181