X – Kasperian Moving Parts

KDE 4.2 (trunk) Now Rocking On My Thinkpad T61!!!

Friday October 3, 2008

My work laptop and main computing device is a Thinkpad T61 with an nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1) card. It’s been a frustrating last year in trying to run a KDE4 desktop as my main work and development environment because of the problems with the proprietary nVidia drivers that show up in KDE4. However, this little post is definitely more of a Huzzah!!! than a disgruntled grousing session. Lord knows we’ve had plenty of those. =:) Thanks to the folks at nVidia who are diligently working on improving the problems in their drivers!! Anyway, I’ve followed everything I could find on Lemma’s techbase pages and in the nVidia forums, but nothing has worked. Until now! I’m running the Read more…

Desktop, KDE, Linux

Multi-Monitor Setup On A Single Physical Head (Now Better!)

That’s a big title, eh? I blogged previously about setting up a multi-head X environment for development and testing, even though I’m working on a laptop with only one card. My previous attempt used Xdmx and multiple Xephyr displays, and there were some problems with it. Thankfully, Lubos commented about his nifty little fakexinerama library that achieves the same result only MUCH easier (easierly?) and without any of the problems that I’d seen using Xdmx/Xephyr(1..n). Here, then, is a description of what I’ve done and the results…. This is a screenshot from within the Xephyr session, showing the 1600×1200 Xephyr display. The cool thing is that using ksnapshot from within the Xephyr session will actually capture the entire display, not 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…