Ubuntu has been changing some things around with it’s notification icons and GNOME applets. Specifically the volume, power, e-mail and Rhythmbox applets. I could stand for most of that, but don’t mess with my music. My main complaint is that being part of the indicator-applet has broke some things I like, such as quickly showing/hiding or muting, since everything must be done via a menu.
Pidgin had this same problem, and they solved it by offering both indicator applet support and notification area support. After talking with the GNOME folks, and reading this bug report, it’s probably not going to get done. Because of the way Rhythmbox is developed, you must install a new package to get the old behavior back. I just made a PPA with the --enable-appindicator=no flag.
Easiest way to install is just sudo add-apt-repository lp:kris-santiance/oldrb and then grab the “update” from the update manager.
There is a GNOME Applet included by default in Ubuntu that allows you to adjust your CPU scaling frequency, which most hardware supports. You can right click any panel and select Add to Panel, then select the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor applet.
This is a misleading name because it does more than just monitor the scaling, it allows you to change it easily. Most people disregard these settings because many settings like this don’t make a huge difference in other applications. There is one place it makes a big difference, which is the mother of all CPU users: Web Flash-based video. This thing basically physically abuses your processor. You can use flash little performance tests to get an idea of how CPU scaling affects your hardware.
In the same way, I find that actually making use of the Powersave and other options when on battery. On desktop systems where power consumption isn’t an issue, this setting will always be set at Performance. While Ondemand is rather good for typical use, some users find that it degrades response-time for things like Compiz.
Also remember that IOWait is typically the bottleneck for a lot of applications. I chose to use Flash as an example because it does a poor job of accomplishing it’s job and as a result requires a magnitude of additional computational power. You can easily compare the amount of processor usage to anything like VLC, Totem, or Mplayer and they will be a fraction of the usage.
If you’ve installed a GNOME Applet, but you can’t see it in the Add menu, then you’ll either have to reload gnome-panel or wait a while. Reloading isn’t the cleanest thing, but you can do it by executingkillall gnome-panel and then gnome-panel via ALT+F2.
Doing this in a normal terminal isn’t advised, because if that shell is terminated it would also end the panel process. However, if you can get around that by using nohup gnome-panel, or using the bash keyword disown after having ran the process in that terminal.