Some of my friends have mentioned that a lot of what I post as helpful to Ubuntu newcomers tends toward the advanced.  So today I am going to post something simple and which will have a positive impact.

Truth be told, the impact is mostly of a user-satisfactory nature and is not at all performance related.

It is possible to add the weather and temperature to your clock/calendar in Gnome under Ubuntu.  (I use the Gnome desktop environment and not KDE, so there you are.)  In fact, it’s really quite simple.

The first thing you will want to do is open your clock’s preferences by right-clicking on your clock and choosing “Preferences“.  My clock is located in my top panel (tool bar) at the far right.  Since this is user-modifiable, I trust you know where to find yours.

With the Clock Preferences dialog open, click on the Locations tab.  Click on the “Add” button and an unnamed dialog will appear.  I typed Seattle into the “Location Name:” dialog and was offered two options.  I chose the Boeing field entry as this was closer to my location than SeaTac.  You may add additional locations here which could be very useful if you have a laptop with which you travel.  If you are able to use one of the locations offered, the other fields will be auto-filled for you.  Alternatively you can fill in the fields manually.  (Latitude and Longitude are optional.  I don’t know how you’d get any weather information for a manually created location.)

Double check on the General tab to ensure that “Show weather” and “Show temperature” are checked.

You may close this dialog using the “Close” button.  Feel free to add other locations later.

Now that you have at least one location created, if you left-click on the clock to pull down the calendar area you will see that your new location is listed (you may have to click the triagle to the left of “Locations” if that segment is hidden).  Since my location is my home, I set Seattle as my home location by clicking the “Set” button at the right of Seattle under “Locations”.  (Note that you can access the Locations tab of the Clock Preferences dialog by clicking on the “Edit” button at the right of “Locations” in this drop-down area.)

Once this is all done, you will be able to mouse-over your weather symbol, either the one next to the clock or the one under “Locations”, and a balloon will appear with weather information.  Since I live in Seattle, the weather symbol is a raining cloud at the moment—though, oddly, outside my studio window it appears sunny.

As a final note, you can select your units for temperature (including Kelvin) and wind speed.

At any rate, have fun with that and as always happy hunting.