I am a dual-monitor whore

After months of annoyance that my laptop could use dual monitors in Windows, but not when I booted Linux, I finally got it working tonight. Ahhh... sweet, sweet screen space, how I adore you.

The laptop is a IBM Thinkpad, T42, 2378-FZU. I've been running Ubuntu on it, and I'm very happy with it so far (the laptop as well as Ubuntu). It uses an ATI Radeon Mobility 7500, so I can't use ATI's latest Linux drivers or the fglrx drivers. But, the 'ati' driver seems to be working OK.

I mostly use the system to program. So, I don't need 3D speed and haven't bothered tweaking those settings.

The magic combination of changes appeared to be adding the Screen element to the second Device section, and then updating ServerLayout to use Xinerama and setup the screens:

...
Section "Device"
 Identifier      "video1"
 Driver          "ati"
 BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
 Option          "UseFBDev"              "true"
   Screen          1
EndSection

...

Section "ServerLayout"
   Identifier      "Default Layout"
   Screen          0 "Default Screen"
   Screen          1 "External Screen" RightOf "Default Screen"
   InputDevice     "Generic Keyboard"
   InputDevice     "Configured Mouse"
   InputDevice     "Synaptics Touchpad"
   Option          "Xinerama" "on"
   Option          "Clone" "off"
EndSection
...

Of course, now that I've got it working... I found a cleaner-looking example on the web.

old candy

I have come into possession of some very old candy. Very old. Well... maybe old. There's pink plastic as part of the packaging. I'm not sure if it was added at a later point, or if it is original.

At a recent family reunion, an aunt was giving away a number of knick-knacks of my great-grandmother's. For some reason, she gifted me with the very old candy. I'm not quite sure why people kept it around.

They appear to be some sort of pastry bag, surrounding a filling of candied fruit and something... perhaps pure eeeevil.

I thought I'd get my gullible friend to eat it. But I realized he was standing on my carpet. But, none of you are on my carpet... so, would anyone like to call dibs?

They can have my girly drink when they pry it from my cold, dead hands

As if it wasn't shameful enough that I have the drinking habits of a teenage girl, the Utah AG would like to remove my beloved girly drinks from the grocery store.

I think this means I need to start drinking out of spite.

New computer. So much memory, so little actual work done.

I finally got a new home computer after limping along at 500Mhz since '98. I like that startup-time of OpenOffice no longer has to be measured in minutes.

brief specs:

• case: Antec TX640 Black
• motherboard: ASUS A8V Deluxe
• cpu: AMD64 3000+
  
• ram: 2GB
• video: MSI FX5500 TD256 DDR
• DVDRW drive
• LG FLATROM L1710S 17" LCD

I tried Ubuntu 5.04 amd64, but ran into trouble setting up the partition on the 160GB SATA drive... I could partition it with Ubuntu's tools (or SystemRescueCD), but the first boot after installation would refuse to run e2fsck on the partition, complaining about a bad superblock.

To be fair to Ubuntu, I am dual-booting it on my laptop (Thinkpad T42) and so far it runs like a champ. Other than the winmodem, all the built-in devices are working... even suspend/hibernate!

Luckily, Mandriva LE2005 x86_64 installed without much hassle. It detected the built-in sound and other devices on the motherboard correctly. Mandriva / Mandrake is what I'd been running on our previous computer, so the transition won't be too horrible for my wife.

I downloaded Nvidia's drivers, and -- after a little experimentation -- I can drive both my old CRT and new 17" LCD monitor. Amazingly, Nvidia's documentation was actually helpful.

One bizarre thing was that although the LCD monitor says it works at 1280x1024... the Xorg log file showed that it didn't think so. So, now I've got TwinView setup for the nvidia card and it is driving both monitors at 1280x960.

Here's the important bit from my xorg.conf file:

Section "Device"
  Identifier "device1"
  VendorName "nVidia"
  BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce4 (generic)"
  Driver "nvidia"
  Option "DPMS"
  Option "TwinView"
  Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30-60"
  Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "56-75"
  #Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024,1280x1024; 1024x768,NULL; 800x600,NULL; 640x480,NULL;"
  #Option "MetaModes" "1024x768,1024x768; 1024x768,NULL; 800x600,NULL; 640x480,NULL;"
  Option "MetaModes" "1280x960,1280x960; 1024x768,NULL; 800x600,NULL; 640x480,NULL;"
  Option "ConnectedMonitor"   "crt,crt"
EndSection

PythonCard presentation

Last month, I gave a presentation on PythonCard to the utahpython UG . The presentation seemed to go over well.

You can get the source files for the presentation here.

first post

This is the first post. It is likely to be the best one.