We all like to learn a little bit about our computers and how they stack up against others. Even if not, the information might be valuable to others trying to diagnose a problem with your machine. There are many ways to discover information about your hardware in Linux, but none of them have come close to the ease-of-use of HardInfo (install).

HardInfo takes everything it can find about your system and presents it in an organized fashion. There’s no need to dig through the output of lspci or run a few commands to find out some network statistics; it’s all right there in front of you.

One key feature that makes HardInfo valuable is its ability to quickly generate a system report. This can be very useful to bug triagers, developers, or your laptop’s eBay listing.

Finally, HardInfo is a great tool to use to rank your system against other machines with various benchmarks, which can tell you if your machine is running at full speed or if something is going terribly wrong. These are also included in the generated reports.

Overall: great tool, easy to use, useful for everyone. Give it a try.

If you followed my recent video tutorial on enabling Ubuntu/GNOME’s Tracker search tool, you should now be enjoying the ability to search the files on your system.

During a recent upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04, which was recently released, I found that the Tracker search tool index had become corrupted. I tried to tell Tracker to rebuild the index, but experienced some weird issues.

In this quick tip, I’ll show you how to avoid this and other issues by deleting Tracker’s index and cache manually, so that it can start ‘from scratch’. Note that if you are having issues with tracker, it is worth trying to rebuild the index from the graphical interface first. This tip is a last resort if you need to clear everything out from scratch and start it again.

Tracker’s Files

According to the documentation, Tracker stores its files in the following locations:

• Configuration Files – ~/.config/tracker/tracker.cfg
• Data Files – ~/.local/share/tracker
• Index Cache – ~/.cache/tracker

If you’re happy with the settings you have, you may want to leave the configuration file intact, and just wipe out the data files and index cache.

Quit Tracker and Delete the Files

First of all, you need to go ahead and quit the Tracker application in the system tray.

Next, you must quit all processes of both trackerd and tracker-indexer, so open up a terminal and run these commands:

And finally, carefully delete the files listed above (excluding the config file, if you don’t think you need to clear that out as well).

So to recap, go ahead and delete the folders:

• ~/.local/share/tracker
• ~/.cache/tracker

and if you wish, the config files:

• ~/.config/tracker/tracker.cfg
• ~/.config/tracker/tracker-applet.cfg

To restart Tracker, I recommend that you log out and log back in so that trackerd and the system tray applet both restart properly. You should then be able to reconfigure it from the beginning as detailed in the original tutorial.

And that should be it – Tracker should rebuild itself from scratch. Useful to know for if things go wrong!

Being able to search your desktop is important. I frequently need to find that file that I know I have somewhere, but have no idea where I put it. Desktop search is a really neat solution, because it means you just start typing and it does the hard work of searching for you.

Ubuntu’s latest release at the time of writing, 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), does have an excellent desktop search tool built in, but it’s not actually switched on by default.

In this quick video demo, I show you how to switch on the desktop search tool and how to get it indexing your system for the first time speedily, before setting it back to a background level of activity again.

If you just want a quick fix and don’t want to watch the whole video (it’s only short!), you can enable desktop search by going to System > Preferences > Search and Indexing.