**There’s no drought of ways to be kept abreast of the weather on the Ubuntu desktop, with the Unity Dash and desktop apps like [Typhoon][1] all offering to help.**
But panel applets that offer quick glance condition and temperature stats, with a ream of detailed meteorological data never more than a quick click away, are by far the most popular weather utilities on Linux.
[My Weather Indicator][2] by Atareao is one of this breed, and arguably the best.
It displays current temperature and conditions on the Unity panel, and has a menu stuffed full of stats, including ‘feels like’, cloudiness and sunrise/set times. In addition, there’s a desktop widget, multiple location support, a choice of backend data providers, and plenty of configuration options.
Sounds pretty comprehensive, right? Let’s walk through how to install and set it up on Ubuntu.
### Install My Weather Indicator in Ubuntu ###
My Weather Indicator is not available to install from the Ubuntu Software Center directly, but both a .deb installer and an officially maintained PPA (providing packages for both Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and 14.10) are provided by the developers.
- Download My Weather Indicator (.deb)
To ensure you’re always kept up-to-date with the latest release I recommend adding the [Atareao PPA][3] to your Software Sources and installing from there.
How? **Open a new Terminal** window (Unity Dash > Terminal, or press Ctrl+Alt+T) and **enter the following two commands carefully**, entering your system password when prompted:
The first time you open the app the following Preferences window will open. From here you can search for a location manually or set it to auto-detect using geo-ip — the latter of which can sometimes be a little imprecise, but saves the need to faff.
If you’re travelling (or in need of some small talk fodder) **you can monitor a second locale**, too. This is set up in the same way as the first but in the ‘Second Location’ tab.
Checking the ‘**Show Widget**’ box in the “**Widget Options**” section adds a small forecast desklet to your desktop. There are a number of different skins included, so be sure to play around to find the one you like the most (note: widget changes are applied on clicking ‘Ok’).
My Weather Indicator uses [Open Weather Map][4] as its forecast backend by default, but other options can be selected from the ‘**Weather Services**’ pane (*require an API key to function):
- Open Weather Map
- Yahoo! Weather
- Weather Underground*
- World Weather Online*
The ‘**Units**’ tab is where you can configure measurements for temperature, pressure, wind speed, etc. These are applied globally to all configured locations; you can’t have one location in Celsius and the other in Fahrenheit.
