GNOME

Beryl – Eye candy for linux desktops

by

If you think Linux is boring, lacks eye candy you find in Windows (esp. Vista); you haven’t seen a Linux desktop running Beryl.

Beryl has added all the eye candy that Linux desktops lacked, now definitely it looks better than Windows XP and in my opinion better than Windows Vista as well.

Here are some screen shots to prove it. 😉 (it is not faked)
Running: Fedora Core 6, GNOME
Desktop cube:


Rain effect (Purely eye candy):

Creating ISO images of CDs in a flash

by

Have you sometimes wanted to copy a cd image to your hard disk while you are using linux/unix. Here is a simple way that requires no additional packages, but no GUI,

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/tmp/cdimage.iso

If you insist on a GUI, you could give a try to GnomeBaker as well. If you are using yum on fedora core 6 use yum to
installGnomeBaker.

yum install gnomebaker

GnomeBaker can burn cds as well, but there a few minor bugs; no harm will be done to your burner or disk. I
managed to successfully burn a Ubuntu Live CD and boot from it, that is enough assuarance for the moment.

GNOME Sensors Applet

by

That’s a cool desktop applet to show the systme temperature, fan speed, voltage, etc.

After I got lm_sensors running I wanted to get the sensor information on my desktop running GNOME. I installed GNOME Sensors Applet using yum (yum install gnome-applet-sensors).

It showed three temperatures(Only two successfully, other with an error), and I removed one. Two temperatures must be mother board and cpu temperature.

You should give a try to GNOME Sensors Applet, if you miss the Windows applets that are usually provided by the mother board manufacturers or just curious.

Cool applet, thumbs up Alex Murray and lm_sensors project

lm_sensors on Fedora Core 6

by

Today I tried to install lm_sensors and use it for motherboard and processor temperature sensoring. I installed lm_sensors rpm found on the installation disks and used yum to upgrade(update) to the latest version (2.10.1-1). The installation and upgrade went smoothly.

Then I tried to detect and configure the sensors using sensors-detect (located in /usr/sbin). Unfortunately it crashes in the middle of detection complaing about a missing file.

# sensors-detect revision 4171 (2006-09-24 03:37:01 -0700)

This program will help you determine which kernel modules you needto load to use lm_sensors most effectively. It is generally safeand recommended to accept the default answers to all questions,unless you know what you're doing.

We can start with probing for (PCI) I2C or SMBus adapters.Do you want to probe now? (YES/no): yesProbing for PCI bus adapters...Use driver `i2c-viapro' for device 0000:00:11.0: VIA Technologies VT8237 South Bridge

We will now try to load each adapter module in turn.Module `i2c-viapro' already loaded.If you have undetectable or unsupported adapters, you can have themscanned by manually loading the modules before running this script.

We are now going to do the I2C/SMBus adapter probings. Some chips maybe double detected; we choose the one with the highest confidencevalue in that case.If you found that the adapter hung after probing a certain address,you can specify that address to remain unprobed.Can't exec "i2cdetect": No such file or directory at ./sensors-detect line 5320, <stdin> line 1.Couldn't find i2cdetect program!! at ./sensors-detect line 5320, <stdin> line 1.

The file i2cdetect didn’t exist in the place it was looking, insted in /usr/sbin/

So I decided to do the fix myself and opened up /usr/sbin/sensors-detect for editing and suspected bellow lines to be the culprit.

# Same for /usr/local/sbin since we need i2cdetect which is installed there# by default (reported by Lennard Klein)$ENV{PATH} = '/usr/local/sbin:'.$ENV{PATH}     unless $ENV{PATH} =~ m,(^|:)/usr/local/sbin/?(:|$),;

Changed it to…

# Same for /usr/sbin since we need i2cdetect which is installed there# by default (reported by Lennard Klein)$ENV{PATH} = '/usr/sbin:'.$ENV{PATH}     unless $ENV{PATH} =~ m,(^|:)/usr/sbin/?(:|$),;

and all worked fine. (changed /usr/local/sbin to /usr/sbin)

I followed the instructions given by sensors-detect and then started lm_sensors service.

Check my next post for how I got the temperatures to appear on my desktop(GNOME).