Linux Tips and Tricks

Ok, so this weekend i decided to take the plunge and get myself a nice new box! I decided to go with Intel Core 2 Duo e5200 , and an Asus P5QL-E mother board, so anyways got everything mounted up and just installed Ubuntu Ibex 8.10 .. so now i wanna see what the temperature ratings are, and this is a snap with Ubuntu.

Open up a terminal and type
sudo apt-get install lm-sensors sensord

After installation of those packages we have to setup our sensors with our cpu
sudo sensors-detect

you’ll have to actually type Yes for all the next part, which is just asking about loading modules and drivers, for your cpu

So after all that we’ll have a little bit of editing to do, sensors will come up and tell you that you need to make some changes to /etc/modules, and will give you a snippet to paste into the file

sudo gedit /etc/modules

and then paste the code into the bottom of the file, for example this is what mine said

# Chip drivers
coretemp
#


Reboot and your all set, open up a terminal and type sensors to see your core temps! if you want to be real slick type watch sensors .. so you can watch the updates in the core temps every 2s .

So, I finally decided to crack out the new Ubuntu release, and the installer seemed to be successfull and it was time to reboot the machine which is where things went terribly wrong. My login screen was a blank screen.

So I then pushed CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to a shell, and noticed that by default the ati opensource video driver in xorg.conf wasnt happy at all.

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "vesa"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
EndSection


So after googling a bit, i discoverd that support for this Radeon Series of cards was updated in later releases of the fglrx driver. Which can be enabled in 5 easy steps.

1. Remove all references to the older fglrx driver.

sudo apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-kernel-source

2.Update the sources list

sudo apt-get update

3. Reinstall the newer drivers

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-kernel-source jockey-gtk xserver-xorg-video-radeon

4. Enable the fglrx drivers

sudo aticonfig --initial

5. Restart gdm

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

We can now verify that we have the right driver installed by using fglrxinfo.
osamad@root:~$ fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT
OpenGL version string: 2.1.8087 Release


And voila, I then was able to launch the ATI Catalyst Control Center from the menu system Applications > Accessories
> ATI Catalyst Control Center , and used that to enable my dual monitors.

After that I enabled the desktop effects and installed the compizconfig-settings-manager
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
System > Preferences > Compiz Config Settings Manager to enable my desktop cube! And now am a happy camper!