Keyboard shortcut to open a terminal window

Hi, I'm using Gnome as a desktop and was wondering if there was a shortcut key to open a terminal window or a way to assign one. I have carpal tunnel syndrome from too much guitar and 3D work and the less I have to use the mouse the better.

I agree completely. The less mouse, the better. If it weren't for web browsing, I would throw my mouse away.

The shortcut settings, however, depend on the window manager that you're using. Newer versions of GNOME use the Metacity (pronounced like opacity, not new york city), and although it has the capability for shortcuts, they haven't added that in the configuration tool. I have no idea why.
In any case, if your window manager is Metacity, run "gconf-editor" and look up /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands. Set "command_1" to "gnome-terminal", and then go to /apps/metacity/global_keybindings, and set "run_command_1" to the key you want, using the same format as the other entries. The help (at the bottom right of the window) also explains the format.

I, on the other hand, use Sawfish instead of Metacity. The bad thing with Sawfish is that it's a bit old and uses GTK+ 1.2 and so on, and it's a bit buggy, but on the other hand it's like emacs, written primarily in its own dialect of LISP and can therefore easily be extended, which I love. Keyboard shortcuts is a small thing for Sawfish.

Wizardy! Thank you!!

BTW, command_1 was set to CTRL-ALT-DELETE so I used command_2 instead and it worked great!

i use enlightenment, and its got a brilliant shortcut setup thing.

Thanks for the tip!

I checked out Enlightenment, compiled ok, as with all its libraries (except freetype but I dont think that was expressly needed) but I can't seem to run it or find other ways if implementing it...do I need to edit something and reboot? Oh and I ran searches, read FAQ's, etc but know one ever directly addresses it.

edit ~/.xinitrc and change it so that the command for the window manager is 'enlightenment' (w/o the quotes)

Thanks :)

Hrm, etc/xinitrc seems to referance a bunch of variables and never mentions anything by name...Xclients however, has this:

# check to see if the user has a preferred desktop
PREFERRED=

Wish me luck!

Nope, defaulted to twm when I tried that. I'm pretty sure I didn't have it installed correctly since I found that Enlightenment wouldn't install from an .rpm I downloaded (rather than the source I tried first) and I hadn't downloaded all the limlib2-loader libs. I downloaded every single rpm they had there and ran them all at once to try and avoid the circular dependencies but hit a brick wall by some rpm not being able to find libImlib.so.1 (which is located in my usr/lib folder).

I can't wait to get good enough at Linux to install programs :)