Today I got dual screen in Ubuntu working… I have been fiddling around with it a few times before but nothing seriously. Never got it working the way I wanted. Earlier I edited the xorg.conf by hand while following guides from the internet and yesterday I stumbled upon a graphical Nvidia X configuration tool by accident… the solution was a bit of both.
The tool is called nvidia-settings and looks something like the image below.
As far as I know there are 2 ways of doing dual screen in Linux. Either you can use Xinerama or the Nvidia built-in feature called TwinView (I might be wrong here 
). Anyways I chose TviewView because that was the default in the Nvidia config tool. After making X aware of my second monitor with the Nvidia tool I saved the X configuration and restarted the X server with the new (Nvidia generated) configuration. The Nvidia generated configuration had 2 problems:
- It removed my danish keyboard
- It made my old monitor and the VGA outled the default monitor.
I want my new monitor on the DVI outled to be the default.
By hand I added the danish keyboard configuration which I copy-pasted from the old xorg.conf:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "dk"
EndSection
To force the DVI to be the primary monitor I used the following:
Section "Device"
Identifier "NVIDIA Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600]"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce 6600"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "NoLogo" "1"
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP, CRT"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
Option "MetaModes" "DFP: 1600x1200, CRT: 1280x1024"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "NVIDIA Corporation NV43 [GeForce 6600]"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection
First I don’t want to see the Nvidia Logo when X is started… it is a nice logo though 
TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder is the important part because this makes sure that the DVI is the default monitor. You can read more about all the possible options for the Nvidia driver on Nvidias homepage.
My only “problem” is that the background image is streched out on both monitors, but I guess I have to make a custom background image for my dual screen setup. Now I can play World of Warcraft in a dual screen setup in Linux as well which was one of the only things that kept me booting into Windows. To bad performance drops a bit in Linux 
But I have a strong feeling that we are to blame Nvidia for that rather than Wine… but its just a gut feeling.
Last week I attended a Xen course on SLES10 (SP1 RC5). We used virt-manager.
I looked for it in Ubuntu but wasn’t able to find it. Instead I found this request for packaging virt-manager for Ubuntu.
I have been trying to do it myself but it isn’t as easy as I thought… I have never really tried packaging anything before (apart from my wallpapers which doesn’t really have any dependencies or make files).
Virtual Machine Manager has the following dependancies (taken from virt-manager homepage):
python >= 2.4
pygtk2 >= 1.99.12-6
gnome-python2-gconf >= 1.99.11-7
libvirt-python >= 0.2.1
dbus-python >= 0.61
gnome-python-desktop >= 2.15.4
libxml2-python >= 2.6.23
vte >= 0.12.2
virtinst >= 0.103.0
Identified corespondent packages in Ubuntu:
python Version: 2.5.1-0ubuntu3
python-gtk2 Version: 2.10.4-0ubuntu3
python-gconf Version: 2.18.0-0ubuntu1
python-libvirt Version: 0.1.8-0ubuntu2
python-dbus Version: 0.80.2-1ubuntu2
python-gnome2-desktop Version: 2.18.0-0ubuntu3
python-libxml2 Version: 2.6.27.dfsg-1ubuntu3
libvte9 Version: 1:0.16.1-0ubuntu1
virtinst (downloadable from `virt-manager`'s homepage)
I guess virtinst would need packaging as well… download virtinst.
The version of phyton-libvirt isn’t new enough either.
I have been looking at a Ubuntu packaging guide but have already run into trouble (even before getting to phyton-libvirt):
...
checking for PYGTK2... configure: error: Package requirements (pygtk-2.0 >= 1.99.11) were not met:
No package 'pygtk-2.0' found
Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.
Alternatively, you may set the environment variables PYGTK2_CFLAGS
and PYGTK2_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.
make: *** [config.status] Error 1
At work today I found an old SCO evaluation CD. A paragraph at the back of the CD cover made me laugh:
> SCO – a tightly integrated set of products which give you the best of both worlds – the power and reliability of UNIX and the freedom of Windows.
The “freedom” of Windows… what is that? :-O Click on the link below for full image.
This week I’ve been on a course to prepare for the Novell Certified Linux Engineer (CLE) which is required (and payed) by my employer.
But to take the CLE certification test you need to be CLP certified first, so today I took the CLP certification.
Now I’m ready to do the CLE tomorrow.
I’ve been working with Linux for some years now so the test wasn’t really that hard. Actually I was disappointed that I only got 718 points, I would have expected more. Anyways it is passed so who cares Don’t know what to expect from tomorrows test, I hope it is as easy as this one.
(Ubuntu is still my preferred Linux distro… but don’t tell Novell 
sssshhh)
Open Source ftw (sorry I’m mentally damaged from playing World of Warcraft, so I tend to use a lot of acronyms).
Just switched the emotion icons in my Serendipity installation with Tango ones. Here is how they look:
:’( 
:-D 
Sadly Serendipity doesn’t support more… I guess I would easily be able to add more by altering the code. It is PHP code after all, but I’m not bothered to do the change with every update of Serendipity. Anyway I got inspired by reading about Tango Smilies in Wordpress by Jeff Waugh.
I knew the icons existed in the instant messenger Pidgin after reading a blog post from the icon author. I have installed Pidgin on my Ubuntu machines and found the icons in:
/usr/local/share/pixmaps/pidgin/emotes/default
I think its kinda hidden. You might have wondered why vmware-server kernel modules was available from the repositories but no vmware-server? The answer is: It is available!
Just like Real Player, Opera and other commercial software you can install VMware-server from the following repository, which you add to System -> Administration -> Software Sources and Third-Party Software:
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu feisty-commercial main
After that you run:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vmware-server
A colleague pointed me a page about adding Adding Canonical Commercial Repositories in Ubuntu, which is actually referenced from the page about Installtion VMware Server in Ubuntu
For those who doesn’t know… a few years back I made the site www.debianart.dk which was supposed to be the center of graphics for Debian. It never took off, mostly because I didn’t really have the time and it didn’t help that I started using Ubuntu instead. I was running Debian unstable at the time because I wanted the latest and greatest (Gnome among other things) so the jump to Ubuntu wasn’t really that big.
Now I use the debianart.dk to host my own Debian wallpapers which I’m actually quite proud of
Even though I use Ubuntu now for my laptop and workstation, I still use my own wallpapers (mostly “apt-get install”).
Right before my interest died for debianart.dk I made a Debian package with all the four wallpapers I have made public. Once installed they would automatically be available when changing background in Gnome. A later version of Gnome changed the location of where you should register background images, and I never got it updated… until now. I got an email from a guy asking how the Debian package worked, which made me pull my head of of my ass and get the update done
Download Debian Wallpapers – Modern Swirl
Enjoy
In the lastest version of Ubuntu (version 7.04 – Feisty Fawn) kernel modules for VMware Server is available in the package vmware-server-kernel-modules from Ubuntus package repository.
The VMware Server itself is at the moment not. You still need to install VMware Server from the tar.gz download from www.vmware.com.
I found documentation on how to make the VMware server kernel modules package work together with the VMware Server installed from tar.gz in the Ubuntu Documentation. I also found the reference to this documentation on the Ubuntu Forums.
The cool thing about this is that you don’t need to run vmware-config.pl every time you update your kernel.
If you upgraded to 7.04 from a previous version of Ubuntu you might run into a problem where you can’t get the vmware console to start. The output on the console will look something like this:
/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libpng12.so.0/libpng12.so.0: no version information available (required by /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2)
I solved it by removing the following packages:
sudo apt-get --purge remove libdbus-1-2 libnautilus-burn3
Don’t worry new packages have taken their spots as far as I know:
libdbus-1-3
libnautilus-burn4
I found a thread on the VMware forums but my solution seemed easier
When I came home from work today I read Planet Gnome, I usually visit Planet Gnome several times a day so nothing new in that.
But this time I found the post “tsclient 0.150 – call for translators” post by Jonh Wendell.
I thought why not… even tough I always use the English language when ever I can get away with it.
I use tsclient a lot at work so I guess it was about time I payed something back to this great program.
I found an old Danish translation back from version 0.106 in the SVN repository, and started from there.
I used a Danish translation guide translation guide since this is the first time I’ve ever translated software.
This guide linked to a nice word list for Danish translations which helped me a few places where I was unsure about which Danish word I should choose. About 2 hours later I was finished and had submitted the translation in a bug report.
I hope someone will find this useful out there.
After buying my Squeezebox I wanted to rip all my music to a lossless music format to get maximum quality out of the little thing. And the Open Source lover that I am the choice fell on FLAC. One problem though…
The problem is that my girlfriend is using Windows with iTunes which isn’t compatible with FLAC or Ogg for that matter.
I googled around for FLAC/Ogg Vorbis support for iTunes and found xiph.org which has a FLAC/Ogg Vorbis plugin for QuickTime ( and therefor also iTunes). iTunes uses the QuickTimes components to playback different audio and video types.
To bad that their latest version 0.1.7 is released only for Mac.
It seems that you need to have FLAC contained in Ogg containers to be able to playback FLAC.
This link: a blog about Xiphs development deserves attention as well.
My only “problem” is that the background image is streched out on both monitors, but I guess I have to make a custom background image for my dual screen setup. Now I can play World of Warcraft in a dual screen setup in Linux as well which was one of the only things that kept me booting into Windows. To bad performance drops a bit in Linux 