Linux for Keysers | Adventures in Open Source

When I left home last night, I had full functional working 3D desktop effects. Once I added my two 1600x1200 monitors this morning and resized my virtual desktop size past the breaking limit, that all went bye-bye. :( I vaguely remember reading that increasing the desktop size on my video card will automatically disable this wonderful feature. Surprise. It did. Well, at least with the old video driver, it's still smoother than the newer ones. Bummer though. I was really liking all the extra "new OS" bells and whistles. Maybe I can find a work-around someday, but I highly doubt it. EDIT: Here's the URL that discusses the root of the problem (I think it still applies to 8.10, but I'm not certain just yet... will look further): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=580891 And some more specific to the Dell Latitude D430: http://www.winchen.de/PHPWIKI/doku.php/public/delld430 Workaround: Switch xorg.conf on bootup depending on whether or not external monito...

Every once in a while, you come across a version of a driver or package that is just better than newer, "updated versions". If you want to keep the old one and stop getting reminders about the new ones, just open Package Manger, select the package you want to keep and then click "Package -> Lock Package" from the menu. This will prevent auto-updates from happening to that package. Also, you can force an old package to be reinstated from this same menu. This would have helped me a TON and saved a lot of time with my video driver woes...

This is kind of funny. I decided to let my machine upgrade from Intrepid Ibex (8.10) to Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) while I was in meetings all morning on Thursday. Great idea, I thought - let my machine toil away while I was away. And I was right (for the most part). I came back to a fresh, shiny new OS with better support for my machine than previously. At work, it was an awesome new user experience with all kinds of improvements over Intrepid and since I've only been using Intrepid for a couple of weeks, THOUSANDS of improvements over my previous installation of Windows XP. However, I had driven to work yesterday and hadn't had the normal 2 hours of bus riding to test out all the multimedia stuff. Today I did and ran into a serious problem. No support for playing back mkv, avi, mp4 or other video formats in Totem or VLC! When I went to launch the video, the program would crash with something similar to this error (reposted from another user with the same issue since I...