One of the main things that concern power users are whether their PC components are running at appropriate temperatures or not. Since high temperatures can result in hardware failures or vice-versa, you need to keep a check. If you are running a Linux distro like Ubuntu , you can add CPU temperature displays to your Gnome desktop panel.

To do so, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you have the ‘universe’ repository enabled. To enable it, go to System > Administration > Software Sources and check the option for ‘universe’.

2. Install the lm-sensors and sensors-applet packages. You can either install them from the Synaptics Package Manager or through the terminal:

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors sensors-applet

3. Once you are over with the installation process, add the sensors applet to your desktop panel. To add it, right click on the panel and select ‘Add to Panel’. From the list, choose Hardware Sensors Monitor and click on ‘Add’.

If you do not see any temperatures being displayed, then it may be possible that lm-sensors does not support the sensors present in your machine. You can verify it by running the ‘sensors ‘ command in the terminal. It will tell you about the supported sensors available.

If you wish, you can download the source package from their site.

Tagged as:
Linux,
Tips & Tricks,
Ubuntu

Firefox 3 came out with a whole lot of improvements and one of the notable one’s was that it shipped with themes that matched the native operating system. The Firefox 3 interface in Windows has really cool Back and Forward buttons. The large round Back button is green in XP and blue in Vista and matches pretty well with the smaller Forward button. The buttons along with the navigation bar make Firefox 3 stand aside from it’s predecessors.

But Firefox 3 on Ubuntu looks a bit out of fashion. It comes with vaguely cartoonish orange arrows, which make it disappointing when compared to the Windows version.

If you are using Firefox on Ubuntu and want those Windows like Back and Forward buttons, you can get the Strata Human Firefox theme . This theme will give Firefox large buttons with a perfectly-matched orange-brown colour combination.

If you are a Windows user, then also you can also install this theme if you like the Ubuntu Human look.

Strata Human 1.0

Tagged as:
Firefox,
Themes,
Ubuntu

Watching videos on YouTube is great fun. Loads of videos are uploaded everyday including music videos, movie trailers, T.V. shows etc. But what about saving your favorite videos on your hard drive? It’s easy if you use Windows as you can extract the videos from your web browser’s temporary internet files folder. But doing this work on a Linux distro like Ubuntu can be difficult for some people, especially for people who are new to Linux. It may seem uneasy but it’s not that hard.

You can make use of the commands in Ubuntu to save your videos. ‘youtube-dl‘ is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube. Firstly, you will need to install ‘youtube-dl’ in Ubuntu.

To do so, give the following command at the terminal:

sudo aptitude install youtube-dl

Using youtube-dl is easy. Use youtube-dl followed by a YouTube video URL to download the video.

For example: youtube-dl “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyz”

Here the video be saved to the file xyz.flv. Since YouTube videos are encoded in Flash Video format, their extension is .flv.

You can change the file name of a video using the -o option.

For example: youtube-dl -o myvideo.flv “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyz”

In this case the video will be saved as myvideo.flv.

You may have noticed that some videos require you to login before playing them. It’s so because these videos have been flagged as containing mature content. To download such videos, you can pass the program the username and password for your YouTube account with the -u and -p parameters.

For example: youtube-dl -u yourusername -p yourpassword “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyz”

Here you username is ‘yourusername’ and password is ‘yourpassword’.

Now you can download your favourite videos and save them on your hard drive on Ubuntu too. Keep them and play them whenever you want.

Tagged as:
Linux,
Tips & Tricks,
Ubuntu