Archive for category Linux

Awesome System Monitoring with Conky

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on February 5, 2009

We’re going to make our Linux desktop look awesome with a tool called Conky. It’s a lightweight system monitor that you can customize to fit with your desktop theme. You can configure how it looks and also what it displays. It can tell you almost anything about your computer (OS,Kernel Version, IP addresses, Fan speeds, CPU Temperature and much much more).

It’s a nice and simple install on Ubuntu. Just run this command in terminal.

sudo apt-get install conky

If you’re running a different Linux you can see installation notes here.

Alright, to start it up hit ALT+F2, type in conky and hit enter. This is what it looks like with the default config…we can make it look a whole lot better. The configuration file is kept in the home folder and it’s called .conkyrc (hit CTRL+H in your home folder to view hidden files and you should see it). If for some reason it isn’t there you can just create your own and save it as .conkyrc. You can also copy mine and change to your liking rather than starting from scratch. This way you’ll have the default structure of the config file.

The config file has two sections, the top is the config parameters and under that is where you tell conky what you want to output. You can set how fast conky updates the info here.

# Update interval in seconds
update_interval 1.0

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XAMPP Setup

Posted by Bhavik in Linux on January 20, 2009

In this tutorial we’ll get XAMPP setup so we can start coding websites.

XAMPP for Linux
Download XAMPP from ApacheFriends. You can put it in your home directory.

Open up a terminal and run this command

tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.7.tar.gz -C /opt

This will extract the XAMPP (should be called lampp) directory to /opt. If you already have an XAMPP installation this command will overwrite it so be careful. Now we need to start the LAMP server using this command

/opt/lampp/lampp start

Now everythings up and running. You can test the setup by going to http://localhost in a web browser.

To start a website you need to create a folder in the htdocs directory under lampp. You can make a simple index.html file and put it in the created folder. Now visit http://localhost/your_created_folder and you should see your index.html file.

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