I just noticed that the clock on my guest Windows XP system was running way too fast on my host Ubuntu Gutsy system. I had also noticed that double clicking seemed really difficult and there were a few anomalies with sound.
| tags: enabling technology, programming, ideas, ubuntu
Our games and tools for kids with disabilities should run on whatever computer they have at the school (typically an old PC running some version of Windows or a Mac). One alternative to cross-platform testing might be a LiveCD that boots some OS (say Linux) and runs our software. Then our development environment is fixed and we're relying on the OS to cover over hardware differences. Pete and I spent a bit of time this last weekend trying our various LiveCDs to see how little memory they could be made to use.
| tags: ubuntu
Today Gutsy automatic update brought in a new kernel and required a reboot. The reboot failed with a scary message after the grub prompt. After a few moments of panic, I remembered the command prompt available from grub and typed
find /boot/grub/menu.lst
I couldn't get sound input to work. Output works fine but the microphone input on my Audigy2 card returned silence. After lots of Googling I found this post on Ubuntu forums. Indeed using alsamixer to adjust Master, Mic, and Analog Mix did the trick.
| tags: ubuntu
I fooled with turning on Desktop Effects in Gutsy. They were on by default on my R60 laptop but wouldn't start on my desktop machine with an nVidia Quadro4 900 XGL driving two projectors. I found the nvidia-settings tool very helpful and realized after some web browsing that I could turn off xinerama and enable TwinView. Doing that plus adding the
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
to my
xorg.conf
fixed things up. Things looked good until I logged out. Attempting to log back in resulted in a blank desktop with the apparently meaningless message
Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
in my .xsession-errors file. I googled around a bit and found a suggestion to try moving aside the .gnome2 folder. I did that and things appeared to work for one or two logins. Then back to hanging.
| tags: ubuntu
My previous despair faded and I'm giving Gutsy another try. Configuring my disks so that I have two partitions available for OS installs made it easy to try things as I got the chance.
I've been annoyed for months by my laptop selecting my neighbor's access point over mine. On every startup I'd have to make sure I was using our network. I looked a few times but apparently with the wrong search terms. The answer is to use gconf-editor as described here . One point that momentarily fooled me, you do not want to use sudo for this.
| tags: ubuntu
I had tons of problems with Gutsy on my computer at work. Feisty worked great so I expected Gutsy to be even better.
| tags: ubuntu
This D800 has the 1920 by 1280 screen and the touchpad defaults are way too slow. I looked for a tool to adjust it but don't see one. I edited xorg.conf to look like this:
| tags: ubuntu
I tried upgrading to Gutsy on my old Dell D800 today, it took about 7 hours to download the packages and then the upgrade failed. It couldn't get the screen resolution right and didn't detect my graphics hardware. The CD does it just fine. So I wiped the root partition and did a clean install. That seems to work fine. The wireless configuration was effortless. Now to figure out all the packages I need. I should keep some notes on the changes I make too.