what to do after a fresh ubuntu lucid install

some things are pretty annoying about lucid, specifically the lack of icons in the gnome menu and the stupid window buttons being in a difference place

over at webupd8 there is a handy script which fixes all of this and more. you can follow the instructions there, get the latest version from https://launchpad.net/ubuntustart/+download or just do this in a terminal

sudo apt-get install zenity
wget http://launchpad.net/ubuntustart/0.4.x/0.4.9/+download/ubuntu-10.04-start-0.4.9.7.tar.gz
tar -xvf ubuntu-10.04-start-0.4.9.7.tar.gz
cd ubuntu-10.04-start/
sudo ./ubuntu-10.04-script

i'd suggest not ticking the GetDeb option (last option at the bottom) as this just slowed things down and broke audacious for me

combine this with the excellent Ubuntu Tweak and i have lucid looking and performing exactly how i want

lucid has no volume icon in system tray

one of the differences in upgrading to lucid is that the volume control is now in the "indicator applet", which i remove because it annoys me

to add this back into the system tray, simply run gnome-volume-control-applet

you can add this to your default session in System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications

how to monitor dmesg in real time

I was looking around for a way of monitoring dmesg output in realtime.

Some distros allow you to tail -f /var/log/dmesg however this stops being written in Ubuntu after boot, so that's not so useful.

I then found the watch command, which executes a command every 2 seconds (configurable if you like). Just watching dmesg fills my terminal output from the start, which is less than useful, so I use tail to shrink it down a bit. The command:

watch "dmesg | tail -20"

does exactly what I was after.

hard drive temperature monitoring

After having a disk recently die due to heat, I bought an Antec P182 case, designed to keep drives cooler. (FYI: it works really well)

I was interested in monitoring my drive temperatures to see how it goes, and found the hddtemp package can do this. A sudo apt-get install hddtemp will install it for you. Say "Yes" to running the daemon on startup.

To get a list of your drives and where they're mounted, you can use the sudo fdisk -l command, along with df -h and mount to see where partitions end up on the filesystem.

To view the temperature of your drives:
sudo hddtemp /dev/sda
/dev/sda: WDC WD800JD-60LSA5: 40°C

hddtemp sensors also have a wrapper into conky, a lightweight system monitoring display program, with the option ${hddtemp /dev/sda}

General forum consensus seems to be as long as your drives are under 50C, you're fine. 50C-60C is a warning area, and over 60C you're cooking your drives and reducing their lifespan by over half!

new kernel not appearing in menu.lst

I updated to the latest Intrepid kernel, and when debconf asked if I wished to upgrade my menu.lst, I accidentally answered "Keep Current Version" instead of "Install Package Maintainer's Version", so the entry for the old kernel didn't appear in the boot list.

A sudo update-grub wouldn't fix it, though I found an open Launchpad Bug, in which it's suggested to rename your menu.lst, and update-grub again.

So,
sudo mv /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.old
sudo update-grub
and I'm back in business!

This does however mean I have to setup custom entries I had before, such as my no splash, my vga parameter, and the chainloader into the Windows partition.