F4 will not show Dashboard

My main answer:

Apple deems this a feature, as documented in their knowledge base. Apple does not document how to disable the delay.

In my experience, if you remap the caps-lock key on Mac OS X (in System Preferences .. Keyboard .. Modifier Keys), and e.g. map it to Control, then the delay goes away while I am logged into Mac OS X. So as koiyu suggests in the comments here, it seems like there is some variation available between the hardware and the keyboard driver.

Remaining questions:

My own problem is that the delay remains when I boot into Ubuntu Linux, and in that context, even when I remap the Caps Lock key to Control, the delay is still present. So the vanilla keyboard driver provided on Ubuntu Linux still suffers from the delay.

So my questions at this point:

• How is it that the standard Windows 7 driver has no delay and the Linux driver does have the delay?

• How can one replicate disabling the delay in the context of a Linux installation atop the laptop?

Mac OS X home and end keys do not function the same way as they do on other systems.

On Mac, the Home and End keys go to the top and bottom of a document, instead of to the beginning or end of a line.

Check out this Lifehacker article which shows how to remap the functionality of the home and end keys to make them perform like they do on other systems.