Cagdas's Blog » linux

Temperature Monitoring and Power Managing in Ubuntu

cagdas — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 21:57:00 +0000

My notebook came with pre-installed Vista. I used it for a few days. It had all the drives and utilities installed. When I switched to Ubuntu on this machine, I couldn’t find alternatives to some of those utilities like power profile manager and system temperature monitor in the default installation. However, after some quick searching, I found a way to do all these in Ubuntu;

For temperature monitoring, install “Computer Temperature Applet” for Gnome (and dependencies) by typing :

sudo apt-get install computertemp lm-sensors

in the terminal.

Then, to activate power profiles, type:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

in the terminal, and say ‘yes‘ to ‘Install cpufreq-selector with SUID root“.

You can now add “Computer Temperature Monitor” and “CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor” to your gnome-panel. You can decrease heat and improve battery life by using the power profiles.

Here’s how it looks =) :

(and yes, i like showing off my desktop =).. )

Why my Ubuntu setup was dead slow lately.

cagdas — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 09:59:00 +0000

My Ubuntu setup had been running insanely slow for a couple of weeks. I tried deleting all my configurations, but it didn’t work. Then 2 days earlier, when I was browsing Ubuntu forums, I stumbled upon some threads suggesting editing my /etc/hosts file would help. I desperately tried this not hoping this would change anything. Then as suggested, I added my hostname (which is ubuntu) to the end of the line :

127.0.0.1 localhost

Now it’s :

127.0.0.1 localhost ubuntu

This unbelievably increased the desktop performance. The gnome-terminal would take more about 10 secs to load, now it takes only about 1 or 2. Firefox loads much more faster.

If you are experiencing performance problems on a high-end computer, the /etc/hosts file should be the first to check.

Note that this will not make your old pc fly. I guessing that my /etc/hosts was corrupted somehow and that the “fast” version is the default one.

Google Calendar & Gnome

cagdas — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:17:00 +0000

If you want to view your Google Calendar events on your Gnome Desktop;

First, go to your Google Calendar and find out your private ICAL url (This can be found after clicking Manage Calendars > Your Calendar Name). You need the one in the private address section, not the one in the calendar address section.

Now, open a terminal and type :

/usr/lib/evolution-webcal/evolution-webcal YOUR_PRIVATE_ICAL_URL

And that’s it. Here’s a screenshot from my Ubuntu desktop :

Note : evolution-webcal may be in different folders in different distros. (For example in SuSe, it’s in /opt/gnome/lib/evolution-webcal/evolution-webcal). If the above code doesn’t work for you, you can locate evolution-webcal using :

find / -name evolution-webcal

command. (Thanks to Jeff for this info. )

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) on Acer 5920G

cagdas — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:43:00 +0000

I have been using Ubuntu 7.04 on my new Acer 5920G. There were some issues with it. First problem was that I couldn’t use the live CD; had to use alternate CD. And the nv drivers didn’t seem to work with the 8600M GT vga on this machine, so no X after the first install. After I used a tool named envy to install the latest Nvidia drivers, I had Gnome running and everything looked fine… till i realized my wireless card was not recognized. Being too lazy to try ndiswrapper, I used the machine without the wireless network capabilities for a while.

After beating the laziness, I decided to try Ubuntu Gutsy on the machine. I grabbed the latest alpha alternate CD (Didn’t want to waste a blank CD for the live version which might not work) and installed it. And ‘Voila!’. Everything was working… Wireless card, bluetooth, sound… Then I installed the latest Nvidia drivers in the repository, restarted X (at least tried to restart it), and I got an X error like :

” Failed to load module wfb …”

I did a quick search on Ubuntu Forums, and found this post . I followed the instructions in the post, and now I have Ubuntu Gutsy running on my notebook.

Compiz Fusion comes out of the box with Ubuntu Gutsy. I like the new effects. And I like that everything concerning the Gnome theme (fonts, effect, icons, etc) are configured from one application (System > Preferences > Appearence).

Ubuntu Gutsy has given me only minor troubles. I guess I won’t have to wait till the release =)

Perfect fonts in Ubuntu

cagdas — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 00:02:00 +0000

I followed this how-to to install freetype and cairo libraries. Now my fonts are better anti-aliased, thus look very cute . And for anyone who wants to have better fonts and don’t want to worry any details, here’s how to do it, in a brief way;

Just open gnome-terminal (or any other of your choice) and type these in order.

1. sudo echo “deb http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu feisty fonts” >> /etc/apt/sources.list
2. sudo echo “deb-src http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu feisty fonts” >> /etc/apt/sources.list
3. wget http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu/937215FF.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
4. sudo aptitude update
5. sudo aptitude install libfreetype6 libcairo2 libxft2

and installing is complete. Restart the X server ( Ctrl + Alt + Backspace), and you are done
Edit : Installing MS fonts first would give better results. I guess you can do it easily using Automatix which is a GUI tool for easy installation of many additional applications in Ubuntu.