I recently installed Conky, which is a highly configurable and “light weight system monitor”. As with many packages, it’s available via the Ubuntu Repositories: sudo apt-get install conky The default installation outputs some pretty useful information about the system – CPU usage, RAM/Swap usage, HD IO, HDD space and so on, and there are also [...]

I do a lot of Web Development, and try to build W3C Standards Compliant web sites – that’s why I always develop a website for Firefox first, and it’s also why I despise – with absolute passion – Micro$hite Internet Explorer (including version 7, which although is closer to following W3C’s standards than any previous [...]

So, I have a state of the art Notebook (well, almost state of the art), with a Duel Core 64 Bit AMD Processor, 2Gb RAM, and a 64 Bit Operating System (Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon) – but, whatever… because I’ve found a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k Emulator! What better use for such a system than to [...]

Please Note: This article is now deprecated in favour of “Full 64 Bit (or 32 Bit) Web Development and PHP/MySQL IDE with Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede and PDT 2″. Thanks! Update 12/04/08: I have now successfully installed the x64 version of Eclipse – see 64 Bit Eclipse: Linux Installation, including PDT, WTP (WST), ATF, and MySQL [...]

I used to love playing Elite when I was younger – a fantastic intergalactic space simulator, so I was delighted when I stumbled across Oolite, which is based on the classic game, but implements modern graphics! It’s already available via the Synaptic Package Manager (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager) – just search for [...]

I’ve been messing around, tweaking and poking my system in an attempt to optimise, and speed things up a little. Installing 2Gb RAM has helped, but I’ve also been playing trying to speed up my laptop’s boot time. I stumbled across a cool little application, called bootchart: “boot sequence auditing and chart generator bootchart allows [...]

There are some great posts in forums and other blogs about getting the Broadcom 43xx Wireless card working in Ubuntu, which really helped me get on the right road to setting mine up (see the end of this post). However, I’m running 64 Bit Ubuntu on my Acer Aspire 5052, so I had a little [...]

When I first installed, I had no sound. So, I played around with the sound control panel (double click on the speaker in the top right), looked at the drivers (ALSA installed correctly), and eventually found that Ubuntu sees my laptop speakers as “Surround”, and not the default setting of “Front”. So, right clicking on [...]

When I first installed Ubuntu, I had a minor problem – well, more of an irritation – whereby the boot up splash screen was blank. The OS booted no problem, but the geek in me likes to see feedback on what’s happening when the OS is booting! Usplash is the application that controls the boot [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to shrink my windozzze partition, and give the extra space to Ubuntu. I’ve been using Linux on and off for some years now, so I have a bunch of commands and methods stored away in my memory, and as such, I remembered that I probably wouldn’t be able [...]