Early look on Ubuntu Friendly – Ensure the hardware you buy would supports Ubuntu!

Ubuntu Friendly is an initiative by Ubuntu community to ensure that desktops, laptops, netbooks are compatible with Ubuntu, hence “Ubuntu-friendly”. Ubuntu-Friendly depends on community participation to verify whether the hardware fully or partially supports Ubuntu, and rate its usability based on the core components tested.

When will it be available?
Ubuntu-Friendly will be available and integrated right into Ubuntu 11.10. Early adopters and testers can have access to it by Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric Beta 2 due to be released in mid-September.

The tool used for hardware testing is “Checkbox” which is accessible from the Live CD, under System Testing menu.

p/s: Visit Ubuntu Friendly page on Ubuntu Wiki, for more information.

Kudos to the Ubuntu community for coming up with this project, it’ll make life more easier in finding computers that fully support Ubuntu hardware!

lowendbox.com: A place to look for cheap-ish VPS and Dedicated Server – Less than USD7 / month!

lowendbox.com is a website that lists bare minimum VPS or Dedicated Server offerings with the lowest price.

For VPS, the category is divided by the virtualization technology and the operating system, as well as the geographical location of the data centers.

low end box VPS

Additionally lowendbox.com provides discussion forum for optimizing web server and databases for the bare minimum servers!

Enable Hardware Notification on Ubuntu Desktop when plugging devices – udev-notify

udev-notify enables hardware notification on desktop whenever devices are plugged to the computer. It provides a convenient way for users to get visual feedback on whether the devices has been successfully recognized by the computer or otherwise.

udev-notify is known to be compatible with Debian and Ubuntu (to some extend Fedora 15) under GNOME and XFCE. udev-notify display the type,name and model of the device connected and recognized by the computer on the desktop.

Udev
Udev
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Installing udev-notify

echo "deb http://download.learnfree.eu/repository/skss / #SKSS" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
wget http://download.learnfree.eu/repository/skss/repo.pub.asc -q -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install udev-notify

And you may try plugging in devices to your computer to see if it works!

CPU and Memory monitor on Ubuntu Panel and Unity on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

Unity users can easily monitor CPU and Memory usage by using indicator-sysmonitor application.

Conky mypapit ubuntu

To install it, you just need to add alexeftimie PPA repository using these simple command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexeftimie/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install indicator-sysmonitor

Note that this doesn't work on previous Ubuntu 10.xx releases.

Alternatively, you can install Conky by running the command:
sudo apt-get install conky

Conky mypapit ubuntu