September 2008 – Kasperian Moving Parts

A Poor Man’s Multi-Monitor Setup On A Single Physical Head

Thursday September 25, 2008

Finally!! I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this for a while now. Namely, I need to be able to test multiple display stuff out in Linux and being that I use my laptop pretty much exclusively for development, and I don’t have mulitple physical monitors handy at home (and certainly not whilst travelling), I’ve been thus far unable to test anything multi-head-ish. But, thanks to Xdmx and Xephyr, this is now possible. Xephyr :3.0 -ac -br +xinerama -screen 600×400 & Xephyr :4.0 -ac -br +xinerama -screen 600×400 & Xdmx :5 -display localhost:3 -display localhost:4 +xinerama export DISPLAY=:5 openbox& xterm& So, the first 2 lines start up X-within-X displays on localhost:3 and localhost:4. The third line starts up Read more…

Life in General

The N810, Lack of PIM apps, and Palm OS VM

Friday September 19, 2008

So, about the biggest complaint that I have with the N810 thus far is that it doesn’t have good, syncable-with-my-Linux/KDE-desktop PIM apps. At least, none that I’ve seen yet. And yes, it would be super neato if I could run KDE PIM apps (korganizer, kaddressbook, etc.) on the N810, but that still doesn’t address the syncable-with-my-Linux/KDE-desktop problem. I have discovered, though, that the Access people (those who bought the Palm OS or something) are providing a Garnet (Palm OS) VM for the Maemo platform!!! You can find out more about it here and download it/install it on your N810 pretty easily. What this means is that you can run all of your Palm applications on your N810! I’ve not tested Read more…

Movies

Nokia N810 and Videos

Dear LazyWeb, I have ripped/encoded a bunch of (my own) movies previously in order to watch them on my PSP. The command I’ve been using is a variation of this: mencoder -sws 9 -af volume=10.1:0 \ -vf pullup,softskip,scale=320:240,harddup,unsharp=l3x3:0.7 \ -ofps 30000/1001 \ -oac faac -faacopts br=128:mpeg=4:object=2:raw -channels 2 -srate 48000 \ -ovc lavc -lavcopts aglobal=1:vglobal=1:vcodec=mpeg4:acodec=libfaac\ :abitrate=128:vbitrate=500 \ -of lavf -lavfopts format=psp \ -aid 128 dvd://1 -chapter 01-04 \ -o $HOME/Movies/Seinfeld/Seinfeld-Season5-11-TheConversion.mp4 … which plays fine on my PSP. Unfortunately, these mp4 movies do not play on my shiney new Nokia N810. I’ve tried using Canola, as well as the built-in media player application, and they both don’t recognize the data as something they can play. I tried installing MPlayer on the Read more…

Life in General

Nokia N810 and an 8 GB Micro/Mini SDHC Card

Thursday September 18, 2008

After reading about a whole lot of problems people have been having with SanDisk micro->mini SDHC card adapters on the N810, I bought this awesome little Kingston 8GB Micro SDHC Mobility Multi Kit Model MBLY/8GB over the weekend for only $30(!!) and just got it in the mail today. After figuring out how to actually put the thing in (label-side up like normal–it’s just a bit of a weird fit), I was pleasantly surprised to find that the N810 promptly displayed a “Memory card available” message and that I could use the card just fine. The 8GB card came pre-formatted as vfat (FAT32) and only reported as having 7.4GB available, which is, I guess, normal (albeit annoying). I reformatted the Read more…

Linux

Modeline Generation and Xinerama Info

Tuesday September 16, 2008

So, I’m trying to think positively about the 3-hour battle I just had with X. I learned 2 new things today, which I didn’t really want to learn but yay nonetheless. First, Xinerama. I’m going to be doing multiple monitor stuff for work, which should be really interesting if I can keep my self-imposed stress level down. I have never had more than a single monitor to use on any given desktop or laptop until I started working at VMware, and as such I am currently less than clueful with how all of this stuff works in X. (As an aside, if anyone can refer me to some really good documentation or multi-head/multi-screen/multi-monitor/multi-display Linux/X resources, I’d greatly appreciate it!) So Read more…

Linux, Open Source

OpenSUSE 10.3 > Kubuntu Hardy -> Fedora 9 -> Mandriva 2008.1 -> OpenSUSE 11

Monday September 15, 2008

I got bored with my Ubuntu Hardy install last week and decided to have a look at what some of the other guys are up to these days. Mind you, there wasn’t anything horribly wrong with my Ubuntu host. I still ♥ apt; IMHO, there’s still nothing faster (although the new package management in OpenSUSE 11 comes darned close!). But anyway, it was an interesting trek across the newest distros and while I was looking to end up with something other than SUSE (again, nothing wrong with it at all–I just like change), I am totally impressed with OpenSUSE 11 and am going to feel satisfied sticking with it for a decently long while, knowing that I’ve shopped around as Read more…