In Ubuntu it can be difficult to customize the indicator applet which by default contains the sound, battery, Bluetooth, and empathy icons. If you don’t use empathy and want to remove the icon there is no simple option to change. Since this is a default indicator icon you must completely remove the indicator-messages package to [...]

Use the Keyboard Shortcuts tool in GNOME to customize the default keyboard shortcuts for your system. If you have a laptop that has special media buttons you can configure them here as well. In some distributions such as Ubuntu these media buttons may be automatically configured but you may still need to fine tune them [...]