Scanning your hard disk from time ensures that you are not risk of losing any data and that you will be able to safely back up your data if your hard disk showed some critical errors. With Ubuntu (and Linxux in general) you won’t need to buy those expensive softwares for checking the health of your hard drive.

GSmartControl is a graphical application for Linux (Ubuntu 10.10) for scanning your hard drive for errors.

GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl, which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive’s SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

Some of it’s features include:

• automatically reports and highlights any anomalies;
• allows enabling/disabling Automatic Offline Data Collection;
• allows enabling/disabling SMART itself;
• supports configuration of global and per-drive options for smartctl;
• performs SMART self-tests;
• displays drive IDs, capabilities, attributes, and self-test/error logs;
• can read in smartctl data from a saved file, interpreting it as a read-only virtual device.

In order to install GSmartControl on Ubuntu 10.10, go to Applications > Ubuntu Software Center and search for gmsartcontrol to install it.

Once installed you can find it under:

Following a gallery of screenshot of the program in action.

Windows button on Ubuntu 10.04 were moved to left and looks like the same trend will be followed in Ubuntu 10.10 code named Maverick Meerkat. We found a simple GUI script to change the Windows button to right side. This script works for both Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10. The script was written by Alex Eftimie and all the credit/copyright reserves with him.

Current Behavior

1. In order to move the windows button to right on Ubuntu 10.10 download the following script.

http://eftimie.ro/store/window_controls.py

2. Once downloaded, right click on the script file and click properties and go to the permission tab. Check the box that reads “Allow executing file as program”

.

3. Double click the file and click “Run“. A window like the one below will appear to toggle window buttons to right or left.

Final result

Hope this solves the issue.

Firefox 4 beta 2 has been making some news across the web and I have found it pretty stable for daily use. There are some cool new features. Let’s see how to install Firefox 4 beta 2 on Fedora 13.

1. Open a terminal window and change to root user.

2. Install the Remi Dependency on Fedora 13

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

3. Install Remi repositories for Fedora 13

rpm -Uvh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/remi-release-13.rpm

4. [Optional] Check for the available version of Firefox

yum --enablerepo=remi list firefox4

You should see an output like the one below

Available Packages
firefox4.i586                   4.0-0.2.beta2.fc13.remi                    remi

5. Install Firefox 4 beta 2

yum --enablerepo=remi install firefox4

Once installed you can find it under Applications > Internet > Firefox 4.0 Beta 2

Avant Window Navigator is docking application for Linux and is one of my favorites amongst others. With lucido theme, it looks pretty neat. Let’s see how to install Avant Window Navigator Lucido on Ubuntu.

1. If you are using the stable version of AWN, then you should remove it first before installing the trunk version. To do so, type the following commands in Terminal.

sudo apt-get remove avant-window-navigator avant-window-navigator-data awn-settings awn-applets-c-core libawn1 vala-awn
sudo apt-get autoremove

2. Now add the Lucido PPA to your software sources

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:albyrock87/lucidoppa

3. Update your software sources

sudo apt-get update

4. Add official AWN applets PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:awn-testing/ppa

5. Update

sudo apt-get update

6. Install AWN Lucido

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator-trunk avant-window-navigator-data-trunk python-awn-trunk awn-settings-trunk awn-applets-python-core-trunk python-awn-extras-trunk awn-applets-python-extras-trunk awn-applets-c-core-trunk awn-applets-c-extras-trunk

Once installed you can find it under Applications > Accessories > Avant Window Navigator
Following is how it looks on my machine.

Firefox 4 has been making some buzz around. With the browser market heating up, none of the companies want to stay behind and Firefox 4 is an effort in such direction by Mozilla. Firefox 4 will be a little more slimmer and will have some neat features including a revamped UI. The beta version of the browser is out though for Linux the version doesn’t have any significant UI changes thought the features are slowly starting to emerge. Once such feature is app tabs. This feature is same as Pin tab feature in Google Chrome.

Test it yourself today by installing the Firefox 4 beta 2 on Ubuntu.

Open a terminal window and paste the following lines (one after another) and hit enter.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-4.0

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/firefox-4.0b2pre/firefox-4.0 /usr/bin/firefox-4.0
sudo apt-get -f install

The wait is over and Spotify is now available for Linux. Following is how you can install spotify in Ubuntu 10.04.

Note: Because they are not able to run ads on this client, this service is only available for spotify premium users. But we can safely assume that it’s coming soon to free users as well.

1. Add repository to your software sources

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following line at the end of the file

deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free

2. Open the terminal window and paste the following command to add the spotify public keys

gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.de.pgp.net --recv-keys 4E9CFF4E
gpg --export 4E9CFF4E |sudo apt-key add -

3. In the terminal paste the following command

sudo apt-get update

4. Type the following command to install spotify

sudo apt-get install spotify-client-qt

5. Once installed you can run it using the run prompt (ALT+F2) and typing spotify.

Ubuntu has come a long way in terms of the user interface and design. With a little bit of tweaking, Ubuntu can be turned into a real eye candy. Following is a collection of some beautiful GTK 2.x themes which could be ideal for someone looking for a new look and change. In order to download, click the title of each GTK theme.

Zuki

Simply Basic

Radiance Drakfire Mod

absolute

Azenis

Equinox Variance (previously Radiance)

GTK Equinox Engine 1.2

Victory (Strikes Again)

Ambiance Refined II

imetalV5

FineryThemes

FineryBlues

LaGaDesk-102-Suite

Khali-Blue

Turquoise_Nights_II_by_nale12

Enjoy the new looks!

Let’s see a step by step guide to install NetBeans 6.9 on Ubuntu 10.04. But before we start with the installation process let’s see what NetBeans is:

The NetBeans IDE is an award-winning integrated development environment available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. The NetBeans project consists of anopen-source IDE and an application platform that enable developers to rapidly create web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications using the Java platform, as well as JavaFX, PHP, JavaScript and Ajax, Ruby and Ruby on Rails, Groovy and Grails, and C/C++.

Release overview of NetBeans 6.9

NetBeans IDE 6.9 introduces the JavaFX Composer, a visual layout tool for visually building JavaFX GUI applications, similar to the Swing GUI builder for Java SE applications. Additional highlights include OSGi interoperability for NetBeans Platform applications and support for developing OSGi bundles with Maven; support for JavaFX SDK 1.3, PHP Zend framework, and Ruby on Rails 3.0; as well as improvements to the Java Editor, Java Debugger, issue tracking, and more.

Following is an Overview video of NetBeans 6.9 release.

Installation

In order to install NetBeans, you will need Sun Java installed on your machine. Make sure you have JDK installed before you begin the installation process.

1. Download NetBeans 6.9 from NetBeans download page

You can select the version you want. I selected the complete version.

2. Once you have downloaded Open a terminal window and navigate to your Download directory (where you downloaded NetBeans installer script). Once you are at your download directory, type the following command to begin the installation.

sh netbeans-6.9rc2-ml-linux.sh

3. This should initiate the installation process.

Once installed you can find it under Applications > Programming > NetBeans IDE 6.9

Following is a short guide to installing Google’s infamous open source Chromium browser which is said to be the fastest browser on planet.

Chromium is the open-source project behind Google Chrome. We invite you to join us in our effort to help build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web, and to create a powerful platform for developing a new generation of web applications.

Following is how you can install Chromium on OpenSuse 11.3

1. Go to http://software.opensuse.org

2. Search for Chromium

3. Look for “Chromium is the open-source project behind Google Chrome.” and click 1-Click Install.

This should install chromium on OpenSuse. Enjoy speed browsing.

This post is specific to enabling 3d (desktop effects) in fedora 13 running on Nvidia graphics. I struggled to enable the desktop effect in Fedora 13. But eventually I managed to enable the desktop effects using the following steps.

Note: This is a 3 steps process. Please follow all the steps to enable desktop effects in Fedora 13

1. Install Nvidia drivers ( if you have 4Gb of RAM or more you will probably have a PAE kernel [32bit only] so follow the PAE part )

su
rpm -Uvh  http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm   http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686

If you use a PAE kernel

su
rpm -Uvh  http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm   http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
yum  install kmod-nvidia-PAE

2. Edit the Grub File

su -
sed -i '/root=/s|$| rdblacklist=nouveau|' /boot/grub/grub.conf
mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname  -r)-nouveau.img
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

3. Reboot

Once you have rebooted go to System > Preferences > Desktop Effects