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.

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.

Many of never use the Caps Lock key, and lament the fact that such prime keyboard real estate is wasted by a useless key. This tip illustrates how to configure your gnome desktop so that the Caps Lock key acts like a third Ctrl key.

If you're experiencing hangs while running with desktop effects (i.e. compiz) enabled on a system with an ATI video card using the OSS radeon driver, you may want to try out the workaround suggested in the very active bug on launchpad regarding this issue: downgrade your ATI driver from 6.7 (Gutsy) to 6.6 (Feisty). This worked on my ThinkPad T42 system and allowed me to use compiz unfettered.

Ubuntu's ATI driver packages are available here: