/misc/ramblings/techno/geek

I'm back to WinXP on my primary desktop. Frankly, because I missed the ability to listen to my music. Suse wouldn't play my mp3's "out of the box". Amarok kept telling me that it didn't like them. I tried to install what I thought I needed through Yast, but an hour later, still no sound out of my speakers. Ridiculous and frustrating. I felt that it actually took me less time to reinstall Windows and get iTunes playing, then it would trying to get Suse to give up some sound.

Eye candy will only get you so far.

The new digg has launched although it's loading extremely slow for me.

Peace out.

Holy crap.

I made the switch. I completely switched over my primary desktop to Linux and it's not the distro that you think. I'm still running Windows XP on my new laptop, but that's only because I need to for work. You may be wondering why I said "Holy Crap"....read on..

The distro I selected for my primary desktop wasn't Ubuntu. It was Suse 10.1. In addition to this, I also got Xgl running on it and this is where the "Holy Crap" came from! I'd seen videos of Xgl before, but running it in person now is uber cool. I showed my wife (who uses the iMac and OS X) and she said "Holy Crap". It's kind of hard to impress someone who's coming from the OS X world.

Peace Out...

Recently installed Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake on an older Compaq desktop I had laying around. The amazing thing about this old comp is that it's very quiet compared to my normal desktop PC...but I digress.

This old Compaq has an Intel i810 graphics chip. Essentially it's the graphics chip built into the motherboard and utilizes system RAM for video memory (ugh). My Benq FP91G+ LCD monitor has a native resolution of 1280x1024. The default installation of 6.06 sets my resolution at 1024x768. This is okay, but I want and like the native resolution. I went to change it under System > Preferences > Screen Resolution but there were no options to set it higher. Crap.

After some research I found out that you can reconfigure xorg by following these steps.

Open a terminal window and type

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Stepping through the configuration solved my problem with the exception of color depth. The default was 24 and I selected that during the configuration. Once I got back to the desktop, I could select 1280x1024 easily enough, but it was unusable. There were vertical lines running the height of my monitor and spaced our horizontally, every inch or so. This wasn't going to work. I finally found out through a little more research, that instead of the default color depth of 24, I reran the configuration and selected a 16bit color depth. Not ideal, but at least my LCD is at it's native resolution.