What about a Pretty Pidgin on your Feisty Fawn?

Pidgin 2.0 logoRecently, I have been configuring Avahi on my laptop and desktop computers and I wanted to evaluate its possibilities. The first obvious choice was using Rhythmbox to share music within the two computers. But that was too easy, basically once Avahi was configured, I had nothing else to do, it just worked…

Thus, I wanted another challenge and I was remembering that Gaim (now Pidgin) should support the Bonjour protocol. Bonjour is an implementation of Zeroconf made by Apple and release as open source. Avahi is another implementation of Zeroconf and is readily installed on Ubuntu by default, though not activated. However, the installed Gaim on Ubuntu 7.04 cannot create a Bonjour account. That was just the excuse I needed to take some times getting Pidgin and installing it.

The installation will describes how to install Pidgin with support for Bonjour and Avahi on Ubuntu 7.04, and I will try to keep it the easiest possible. However, you will have to use the command line. No worries, though, as I will try to make it easy! :-) A second little chapter will explain how to activate Avahi. This guide has been validated on both the 32bit and 64bit versions of Ubuntu.

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Increasing laptop battery life in Ubuntu

Gnome Power Management logoThe nature is getting greener everyday, so why can’t we? I decided to invest a bit of my time solving a problem with Dell laptops running Ubuntu and the LCD brightness. The root of this problem is detailed in the Dell Latitude D600 laptop page on the Ubuntu Wiki. To shortly summarise the current release (7.04) of Ubuntu does not manage to talk with the Dell hardware properly to get the brightness state and to modify it. Therefore, Ubuntu cannot dim the LCD brightness to save energy on such laptop.

This post briefly offers some technical background before pointing to a guide in wikishelf, which will explain how to activate the control of the LCD brightness and take advantage of the Gnome Power Manager facilities to save some more battery life.

For other tips and tricks to lower your power consumption on Linux in general, try this article about Linux power management, how to optimise power consumption, most of these information are not specific to Dell laptops or Ubuntu, they can even be applied on desktop computers to save energy.
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