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CONFIGURING X

This is assuming you have set up the restricted nvidia driver in Ubuntu, your LCD monitor is working, and you want to add a TV for playing movies. Open a terminal and type these three commands seperately. The first backs up your xorg.conf

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

The next one creates a working xorg.conf for us to use.

sudo nvidia-xconfig

And this one opens the nvidia settings tool with sudo so we can save our changes.

sudo nvidia-settings

Under X Server Display Configuration “Detect Displays”, “Configure…” and configure the monitors as “Separate X Screens”, set the resolutions right, and Save to X Configuration File. Here is how I set mine up.

Then open a terminal and type

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

In my case my tv is CRT-0 with a resolution of 1360×768. My LCD is CRT-1 with a resolution of 1680×1050. Find the line than says

Option "metamodes" "CRT-0: 1360x768 +0+0"

and change it to

Option "metamodes" "CRT-0: 1680x1050@1360x768 +0+0"

This will squeeze the 1680 screen into a 1360 container (as far as I understand). Before finding this, I was missing the right side and bottom of the screen.

Restart X and you should have your regular LCD setup, and another X screen for your TV.

If you run into trouble editing xorg.conf, you still have a backup. Boot to a console and type

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak /etc/X11/xorg.conf

CONFIGURING VLC

Then in VLC, go to Tools > Preferences > Show Settings – All > Video, check Fullscreen Video and uncheck Embedded Video. This separates the controls from the fullscreen output so you can control it with your computer (my TV is in another room).

Then go to Output Modules, and select an output type (in my case XVideo) and then set it up to match your configuration. Here is mine.

You can find these values in nvidia settings to some degree, and the rest is just finding a match. I found I had to restart VLC after each change to take effect.

I had a lot of trouble with this before and was cloning the monitor output, then switching my resolution to 1360×768 each time. I find this to be a much better solution, but I can’t promise anything, it’s just the way it worked for me. Good luck!

Here is some links that I bookmarked along the way. Thanks to everyone that helped!

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/6386
http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/2986
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/dual-monitors-with-nvidia.html
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=31726
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=54263
http://navetz.com/view.php?id=132
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=221174

Computers, Ubuntu No comments

I was surfing around this Saturday, and found this page Lifehacker – Top 10 Ubuntu Downloads – Ubuntu through Delicious.

Boy did that ever mess up my plans to get some things done around the house this weekend. This is the kind of program I love. I write a lot of CSS, which is Edit and View. It’s simple, there is no compile errors, and other than some ignorant FTP servers, it’s instant fun. So when I found that the program conky comes with a single configuration file (~/.conkyrc), naturally I am stoked. Edit, Kill, Run, View. It still works for me. Sure you can make it more complicated, but you can also break it down easy. I spent most of Saturday learning the variables you can work with, and now am getting back into shell scripting cause there is some amazing things you can do with conky plus a shell script!

Computers, Ubuntu No comments

Found a good deal the other night on some new parts bundled and got about 40% off ($124 bucks instead of $204). Yesterday I got it all put together carefully, installed Ubuntu on the box and went to bed happy. Then when I woke up this morning, there is kernel panic errors, and all sorts of smokescreens going up.

I finally started with the remove everything strategy, and soon as one of the Ram chips was removed, everything was fine. Did a memtest86 on each of them, and sure enough one passed fine, and one failed miserably.

Return! This Ram is going back soon as I can make it to Langley. Had another 1Gb stick so dropped that in there until I get it replaced. Everything else worked great.

For anyone who is looking for answers, I found that these kernel panic errors can be due to just about anything (I know, I didn’t like hearing that either). From my searching, It went from Software bugs (So try different OS disks if possible), a short on the motherboard, bad IDE controllers, mismatched IDE devices (hard drive and cdrom on same cable), Bad Ram slots (try just one chip at a time in one slot then the next), Incorrect Bios settings, and power supply (or lack of) problems.

Take out everything and start one device at a time. Keep searching! You’ll find it :)

Computers, Ubuntu No comments