Ubuntu Tips (beta)

Power users are often concerned with making sure the components in their machines are running at appropriate temperatures. An unusual rise in the temperature of a CPU, for example, could indicate a poorly attached fan or generally suboptimal cooling configuration. This tip shows you how to add CPU temperature displays (and potentially more) to you Gnome desktop panel.

Even with the latest and greatest release of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, font configuration in Linux can range anywhere from somewhat confusing to downright difficult. On top of the configuration difficulty, nobody can agree on what makes fonts look good. This article aims to document several approaches to font rendering, and the appropriate configuration settings to implement each approach.

When Gutsy is installed inside a VMware virtual environment, the mouse device gets assigned the standard "mouse" driver which causes. Even with the latest release of VMware Workstation (6.0.2 at the time of this writing), the vmware tools installer does not correctly install the 'vmmouse' driver and configure the Gutsy guest to use it.

Some fonts look better when they are rendered without font smoothing. This tip illustrates how to write a .fonts.conf configuration file so that only particular fonts are rendered without antialiasing.

This hint illustrates how to improve the default look of the web form controls in the Firefox browser.

This tip provides instructions for creating a see through terminal with the contents of the background blurred a la Windows Vista's glass effect.

With a little scripting, Gnome can be configured to use gmail as the default handler for mailto: URLs.

On a default Ubuntu system, any task which requires root (or Administrator) privileges runs a program called 'sudo' (or it's graphical equivalent, gksu) to run a helper program in a privileged mode. By default, for security reasons, this program will ask you to input your password. If you make a lot of settings changes on your system (or need to run a lot of programs as root), each password prompt can get rather annoying. This tip shows you how to configure sudo to allow specific users to run commands as root (or any other user) without prompting for a password.

Often, one needs to install Ubuntu from behind a corporate firewall. While this seems like it should just work, the installer will get stuck while trying to access the package repositories and check for security updates. At this point in the process, the installer is attempting to contact an http address, which will be inaccessible unless a proxy server has been set up. This tip describes how to teach the Ubuntu installer about any proxies that may be protecting your network environment.

For people who care about how their fonts look on Linux, Arial has always been a difficult font to have rendered correctly. This tip allows you to use the free Liberation Sans font (which has the exact same metrics as Arial) in all places where Arial would be used.