Wanted to put down some useful things I have learnt about dual-screening in Ubuntu since I moved over to working under Linux full-time at work (and thus using a dual-screen environment more consistently).

1. The Intel driver for their gfx chips can’t do 3D on a combined screen size of wider or higher than 2048. So, if like me, you want to have your 1440 to the left of your 1280 monitor, with a total size of 2720, then you can’t have Compiz desktop effects enabled. (I think the solution would be to have them on top of each other, which would be <2048, but I haven’t tried that)

2. The guide here has some handy stuff about setting up xrandr to detect at login whether or not you have 2 screens connected – works great for me.

3. GNOME by default will always put it’s panels on the external monitor in a dual-screen setup. However, I discovered that you can tweak this by editing gconf when you login, adding a couple of lines to the ones added in step (2). (In file /etc/X11/Xsession.d/45custom_xrandr-settings:


if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
xrandr --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --auto --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT --auto $EXTERNAL_LOCATION
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel_screen0/monitor 1
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/monitor 1
else
xrandr --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --auto --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT --off
fi


4. If you have your virtual screen size set up appropriately, then the System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution dialog also seems to work pretty well for times when you’re adding a projector on (although you’ll need to drag panels across from the projector as per (3) – haven’t worked out where I can add the gconf changes to make this happen automagically)

Anyway – still a work in progress. This was all done on Hardy – Intrepid upgrade on the to-do list once the relevant packages for my work software are available. The screen handling stuff may well be better in Intrepid.

mrBen

November was probably one of the busiest months I’ve had in a long while. All the weekends contained some sort of activity, split evenly between church and Invest events. Added to that a load of stuff at work, including a 2 day conference in Edinburgh and a job interview, and things were a bit hectic. Here’s to a quiet December!

At the Customer Contact Association conference in Edinburgh, a lot of folks were talking about Net Promoter Score(NPS), which is essentially a gauge of how likely people are to recommend your business to their friends. Interestingly (but not surprisingly) most banks score very low on this, although First Direct apparently is consistently high (60-70% better than most other banks, from what I could tell).

In lieu of this, I thought I would recommend a company that has been getting a chunk o’ money from me in the last few years. Regular readers of this blog, or regular visitors to our parties, may remember the infamous party at our flat in Haldane St that was a hotbed of inventiveness, being the source of not only vodka-cheese, but also a tasting ground for various bathroom products. By way of apology, the instigator of the madness purchased a number of replacement products for myself and Heather.

One such product was a set of King of Shaves lotions, and I’ve stuck with them from that day forward. The KoS shaving gel is great in that it produces virtually no foam, which makes it much easier to see what you’re doing, and doesn’t clog up the blade nearly as much. I also like their facial wash and aftershave kit. And, due to a need for replacement blades, I recently succumbed to try out one of their new Azor blades – a full review on that once I’ve used it a few times! (My previous weapon of choice was one of those vibrating Mach3 Turbo things, that I bought to shave off my goatee all those years ago, which was also a good blade, but replacement heads are a good deal more expensive than the KoS stuff)

Any products out there that you swear by?

mrBen

At the back of my mind… is what I originally wanted to post about. Damn, it’ll get back to me eventually. It always does.

I’ll have to remember to post about it then though, and not wait thinking I’ll remember…

Oh, well. To fill the space I’ll share this.

I has a mock assessment this morning at my course and I did… not brilliantly. That’s what comes from writing 50 thousand words when I should have been studying. Some things are just more important I guess.

And because of some unnecessary aggression from one of the students there, not me I can assure you, I was particularly taken by the last panel of this comic.

It truly is the simple things in life that keeps me entertained.

Oh, and before I forget, I saw The Mist last night. It’s a Frank (Shawshank Redemption) Darabont film based on a Stephen King novella. Genuinely terrifying.

Anyways, time to get some work done…

BigAl