Moved to self hosted blog.

I have set up a self-hosted Wordpress blog. I'll no longer be blogging here. click to visit my new blog. The RSS feed address remains the same.

Ubuntu on Notebooks : Temperature Monitoring and Power Managing

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;

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Why my Ubuntu setup was dead slow lately.

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...

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Google Calendar & Gnome

If you use Google Calendar and Gnome desktop, you would possibly want to see your Google calendar events on your desktop. It's quite easy;

First, go to your Google Calendar and ...

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Competition

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) on Acer 5920G

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 =)

Qt Jambi

While I was browsing random websites, I stumbled upon Qt Jambi: TrollTech's Framework for Java desktop development. After I ran the demos, I got really impressed. The demos look/run just like native Qt applications, and use many cool Qt functions. Another great step for better Java desktop development.

And also, with the release of Java 6, we have seen great improvements on the GTK Look&Feel. Applications with GTK L&F also look just like native applications.

Since it's also free, I am expecting Java to be the first choice for Linux desktop applications.