One of the last tasks that moving to my new machine involves is to stretch the Ubuntu desktop across both of my monitors. Our sysadmin had very kindly set it up to work with the monitor card integral to the motherboard, so in principle I only had to tweak the configuration for X, the standard Linux GUI system.
Could I get this to work? Could I hell. xorg.conf configuration after configuration threw the error
I have a couple of on-login tasks doing various distributed office jobs for me: one brought in all the networked drives from machines in this and the other office; the other backed up my locally stored email to the office server. Because my work rarely spans offices I don’t pay much attention to the former; I pay even less to the latter. For various reasons I’m using ssh to make these connections—sshfs and duplicity over ssh, respectively—and I’ve found it easy enough to set up using keys on the two servers in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys .
The Ubuntu Live CD worked straight away for the laptop: I was able to boot into a temporary copy of Linux using the VESA display drivers, and test sound, CD and other peripherals (obviously) and wired networking. However, optimising the system wasn’t so easy, and as I say Nick practically installed Ubuntu for me, fixing all that he could.
Below is a list of the main fixes and workarounds that Nick employed, for my reference as much as anything else.
Now that Gutsy Gibbon is fairly mature, I’ve managed to upgrade my machine to it and am now running the 2.6.22-14-386 kernel. More importantly, with a minimum of fuss I now have video, wireless and sound!
One of my resolutions this year is to try to cut down on the carbon I spend on music. Notwithstanding my purchase of the In Rainbows discbox, I’ve amassed an awful number of discs of metallized plastic in barely-recyclable containers. (I say “barely” because K. got me a pencil for Christmas made out of old CD boxes, and a pen from dead car parts. But there’s only so many pencils the world can use.)
In brief: the problems discussed here and here go away under the most recent Ubuntu release, Hardy Heron, which I can generally recommend.
Alsa seems stable and graphics support is present from installation onwards.
I love Stevey's Blog Rants: I don't always agree with him, but he puts forward a hell of a lot of interesting ideas. Also, he writes long blog posts, which is respectful to his readership, who he considers to be something other than attention-deficit idiots.