Ubuntu: "print screen" button behavior

I've grown use to the behavior on my windows computers where pressing the "print screen" key on my keyboard silently copies a screenshot to my clipboard & I can CTRL+V it anywhere I like.

On my Ubuntu system it's just saving a PNG to my desktop though.

Is there a way to specify what I want to happen when I press the "print screen" key ?

Keeping in mind that my primary use for this has always been quickly capturing a screenshot into something such as Irfanview where I can just as quicky crop the important section of the screenshot & save that portion of the image from there.

I'm open to suggestions of alternative methods as well, I suppose that's all I ever really use the "print screen" key for anyways.

I think I'll be using the File -> Aquire -> Screenshot option in Gimp from now on.

When I press print screen, I get a dialog about where to save the resulting image. Incidentally, Alt+Print screen does just the current window.

I think it's a Gnome thing rather than unbuntu though.