HOWTO disable middle-mouse-paste in Linux

A coworker couldn’t stand the fact that, on his linux computer, when he accidentally clicked the mouse wheel, it would paste text. He offered to buy me lunch if I could turn it off. Here’s how we did it. Run the following command:

> xmodmap -e “pointer = 1 25 3 4 5 6 7 8 9”

To persist this behavior, edit ~/.Xmodmap and add
> pointer = 1 25 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Next annoyance: My coworker uses Eclipse, and wants to hit the F10 key. GTK (the toolkit underneath Gnome) maps F10 to pop up the application menu. In RHEL/CentOS 4, there’s no good way to fix it. On my Fedora 6 machine, I did the following:

> gconftool-2 –get /desktop/gnome/interface/menubar_accel

I saved off the value of that, which was “F10”. Then I ran this:

> gconftool-2 –type string –set /desktop/gnome/interface/menubar_accel “Ctrl-Shift-M”

It also works to use gconf-editor to edit the key /desktop/gnome/interface/menubar_accel.