How do I in general find out, what the very nice "System Settings GUI" in Ubuntu (say 12.04) does and how to replicate the changes in command line? Many people ask questions like "how to change the keyboard rate using command line", and often the answers do not help and are hard to find. What is the easiest way to find out, what the GUI is actually changing (for various types of settings. I.e. keyboard layout, rate, mouse, network, ...)