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Archive for the ‘System Tools’ Category

Conky: System Monitor for Ubuntu

06 Sep

Conky is a free, lightweight system monitor for GNU/Linux/BSD, that displays any information on your desktop i.e Cpu usage, Disk usage, Download/Upload speeds, CPU/Hard Disk temperatures, list of programs with pid (taking max cpu) etc . Originally a fork of Torsmo, Conky’s torsmo-based code is BSD licensed. New code in Conky has been licensed under the GPL 3.0.

Over the years, Conky has changed significantly from its predecessor, while maintaining simplicity and configurability. Conky can display just about anything, either on your root desktop or in its own window. Not only does Conky have many built-in objects, it can also display just about any piece of information by using scripts and other external programs.

Features : It has more than 300 built-in objects including support for :

  • A big list of OS stats (username, uptime, CPU usage, memory usage, download, upload, disk usage, “top” like process stats, and network monitoring, just to name a few)
  • Built in IMAP and POP3 support
  • Built in support for many popular music players (MPD, XMMS2, BMPx, Audacious)
  • Can be extended using built in Lua support, or any of your own scripts and programs.
  • Built in Imlib2 and Cairo bindings for arbitrary drawing with Lua.

and much much more….

Conky can display this info either as text, or using simple progress bars and graph widgets, with different fonts and colors.

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Posted in Administration, Applications, System, System Tools

 

VirtualBox 3.2.8 in Ubuntu

07 Aug

Its been a while since we have discussed Virtualisation in Ubuntu using KVM – Kernel Virtual Machine. Its about time for us to move on to discuss one of the most famous cross-platform Virtualisation solutions out there – VirtualBox.

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualisation product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Recently, Oracle Virtual Box 3.2.8  has been released with a lot of improvements. We will discuss the installation of Virtual Box and using it to run a Guest OS inside Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Download :-VirtualBox 3.2.8

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Posted in Applications, Install, System, System Tools

 

Best Ubuntu Download Managers Reviewed

03 Aug

A Download Manager is a program dedicated to the task of downloading, provides means to recover from errors without losing the work already completed, and can optionally split the file to be dl/ul into segments, making the process faster.

We have tested many download managers for Ubuntu & came up with best of them all:

  • Jdownloader
  • Multiget
  • FreeRapid
  • Fatrat
  • Wget
  • Curl
  • Aria2
  • Axel

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Posted in Applications, Internet, System Tools

 

APTonCD: Update Ubuntu Offline

08 Feb

As we all know that Ubuntu Karmic/Jaunty and other versions come in a limited 700 mb CD, that means to have a computer running properly with Ubuntu requires an Internet connection. Sometimes, we come across hard-drive failures etc., so this creates a problem of downloading all the updates and applications again. Moreover, internet is not available everywhere. So, to solve this, we have an application that will do just fine. APTonCD is a tool with a graphical interface which allows us to create one or more CDs or DVDs with all of the packages we’ve downloaded via ‘apt-get’ , ‘synaptic package manager’, ‘ubuntu software center’ and ‘add/remove’, creating a removable repository that we can use on other computers also. :) APTonCD also allows you to automatically create media with all of the .deb packages located in one specific repository, so that we can install them into other computers without the need for an Internet connection’. It also serves as a backup to our installed applications, programs and updates.

Download:

all.deb : click here

tar.gz : click here

Installation:

Option 1) If you have downloaded the .deb file (recommended), you just need a double click to go . Easy, isn’t it :P

Option 2) For the second one, you can easily compile the downloaded source code (tar.gz file) using the following commands in terminal:-

$ tar -xvzf aptoncd-*.tar.gz
$ cd aptoncd/
$ sudo make install

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Posted in Administration, Applications, System Tools

 

Ubuntu Tweak: The Ultimate Tweaker For Ubuntu

24 Jan

Ubuntu is considered as one of the most user-friendly Linux distributions  available today. But still, there are some hidden functions and settings that will improve your Ubuntu experience to a great extent. Though you don’t need a third-party program to unlock them, you just need Ubuntu Tweak. It will save a lot of time of yours as this application gives you a UI to control and configure your system settings yourself. Ubuntu Tweak makes it easy to change hidden system and desktop settings. Unfortunately, it is only for GNOME desktop environment. This is still under heavy development and a very good utility for Ubuntu users. Tweak is more or less like Ubun-student but a bit more stable and reliable with lesser bugs.But this application is also going heavy development, so watch for updates and latest releases regularly. It was basically build for the new Ubuntu users to help them getting a experience. We recon this a must have for your Ubuntu Desktop and we are sure that it will improve the usability of your Ubuntu desktop significantly.

Changes OverView:

  • Support of Ubuntu 9.04 and before DROPPED.
  • Use all native icon in UI.
  • Migrate from policykit to policykit-1, no C code any more.
  • Support dynamic-module, only load module what desktop supports.
  • Redesign the sidebar and titlebar.

New Features :

  • Application Center: improve from Add/Remove, supports online data sync.
  • Add the option to disable user list in gdm.
  • Add indicator-session dialog control.
  • Improve the computer page, add “Change Hostname” feature.
    Source Center: improve from Third-Party Source, supports online data sync.
  • Add the menu and button icon options to gnome settings. – Add the show desktop icon again.
  • Update Manager: a simple but more human-readable update manager.

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Posted in Administration, Applications, Preferences, System Tools

 

WUBI – Windows based Ubuntu Installer

24 Dec

Wubi (Windows-based Ubuntu Installer) is an official Windows-based free software installer for Ubuntu.It can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. It allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way. Trying Ubuntu out has never been easier.

For history freaks Wubi was born as an independent project but after 8.04 alpha 5 , it started coming within the iso. The goal of the project is to assist a Windows user unacquainted with Linux in trying Ubuntu without risking any loss of information due to disk formatting or partitioning .Wubi can also uninstall Ubuntu from within Windows. It adds an entry to the Windows boot menu which allows the user to run Linux. Ubuntu is installed within a file in the Windows file system (c:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk), as opposed to being installed within its own partition. This file is seen by Linux as a real hard disk.

While Wubi does not install Ubuntu directly to its own partition this can also be accomplished by using LVPM, a Loopmounted Virtual Partition Manager, to transfer the Wubi-generated Ubuntu installation to a dedicated real partition. The creation of Virtual partition and installation of Ubuntu in it saves your data in c:\ drive and it deosnot let any change happen to your system ,its just that it takes some part of your disk space :) .

Wubi also creates a swap file in the Windows file system (c:\ubuntu\disks\swap.disk), in addition to the memory of the host machine. This file is seen by Ubuntu as additional RAM. A related project named Lubi (Linux based Ubuntu installer) is also present which lets you install Ubuntu in Linux host machine. After installation , you will be able to dual boot b/w your own previous Linux and Ubuntu.

Caution:-  : Wubi sometimes can create problems with certain hardware and hangs out . The only option at that time to regain your system is hard reboot (CPU reset or UPS shutdown :P )

Hardware Support :- intel x86_32 bit version of ubuntu and x86_64 bit versions are supported.

Installation procedure :-

1) The first step is to get your Ubuntu installation Iso image. You can get your copy here . To read more about Karmic koala – Ubuntu 9.10 , please read our previous post.

2)Once you have your ubuntu copy, then burn it into a CD or install via USB drive. For using USB, you will need Unetbootin(Universal Netboot Installer) which you can get it here .After running this software select the option “Diskimage ISO” & just give the location of the image file you downloaded.

3)Now , insdert your CD or USB into your computer. Then , open My Computer on your Windows and goto the Installation CD directory os USB drive. Double click Wubi.exe .You will see an ubuntu menu like this one.

main menu

4)Now click “Install inside Windows” .You will get option to select destination , desktop environment , username /password etc.

Installer

Note:You must have about 6 gb space free for installation , rather the installer asks for only 4 gb but for a better experience, it is recommended to have larger space.

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Posted in Applications, System Tools

 

WineXS: A GUI for Wine

11 Dec

Wine as we all know is an Opensource implementation of Windows API to linux .Wine can be used as a development toolkit as well as a program loader for creating a compatibilty layer b/w linux and windows applications .It can be used to run almost all Windows applications and games in linux platform. As we have already covered Wine in our previous postings, we are familiar with it but  the concern for a Wine UI still continues. And, now the wait is over.We are happy to inform our users that there exists a frontend named WineXS that gives a proper UI for Wine for installing and removing applications. Now , we dont have to rely on .dlls(wine has the ability to use .dll if available) and .exe’s . We can directly install softwares in wine using WineXS and remove them directly without going to a Windows machine. It gives user a full control over wine for installing , removing softwares, editing wine registry , file-management , installing system files , kill wine if it hangs out :P , user guide etc.

Installation Process :

For installing Wine ,please refer our Wine-post or one can also use Ubun-Student for installationof wine to your computer system.

Installing WineXS:

We at first download the file into the destination folder where we need winexs to be into say it is /home/user.

cd/home/user

sudo wget http://tsx.nl/files/winexs-1.4.2.tgz

CreatingDirectory

download

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Posted in Applications, Games, Internet, System Tools

 

KVM: Kernel Virtual Machine

26 Oct

We have been looking forward for a replacement of Virtualbox OSE . This thing started our quest for finding a Virtualization application to fulfill the needs with an easy-to-use procedure. We found KVM in Add/remove while we were looking for something alike YaVM – Yet another Virtual Machine (An application developed for openSUSE in 2006 to serve as basic virtual machine that comes with the os preinstalled). Xen , the geeky Virtual machine by SUSE linux enterprise is a virtualization powerhouse. While Xen offers quite complex procedure requiring you to boot a patched Xen kernel to create and run a Virtual machine – KVM is a loadable module which runs with the OS’s default kernel module.  The only thing it requires is that your processor should have the architecture to support visualization .

For this type:

kvm

in the terminal and see the result:

QEMU PC emulator version 0.9.1 (kvm-84), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard
usage: qemu [options] [disk_image]

If you see the above message, then you should be smiling as you are green to go for virtualization with your hardware.

But if your CPU does not, in fact support Hardware virtuallization, you will get output such as the following:

$ kvm
Could not initialize KVM, will disable KVM support
Ubuntu does not support running KVM without hardware acceleration. Sorry.

So lets start our work with Virtualization  weapons at hand. First,  head on over to the KVM HOME PAGE

Best feature of KVM is that it is part of the OS and is not dependent upon a 3rd party vendor . Also, it’s very easy to maintain as you update your system, and load new kernel revisions, as the module will not break  like VirtualBox and VMware solutions would. Also, it’s far less problematic to manage than Xen, which is entirely unsuitable for a desktop system IMO . KVM really is more of a direct competitor to Xen than to a workstation solution like VirtualBox or VMware workstation, and has some very powerful features, I will never tap into here on my home system. By design however, it’s far less intrusive on a standard Linux desktop than Xen.

Now we have our kernel module working properly and rest everything in place so must get back to business . I will use Kubuntu for the testing purpose coz its my personnel favourite and it very light too.

Follow these steps to set up your virtual Machine :-

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Posted in Applications, System, System Tools

 
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