Hugo Jonker

I am the new and proud owner of a desktop machine (the cheapest PC I’ve ever bought — and the other two were cheap netbooks(!)). Last time I was in Eindhoven, I bought some lengthy VGA cable. See, the desktop isn’t as mobile as a netbook, and I like to connect it to my TV. Especially after the movies Agnieszka made of my performance in the show turned out to be too much for the processors in my little netbook… I hope this desktop does have the juice to handle them.

Anyway, I hooked up the telly to the TV last night. Major bummer: resolution sucked.
Reboot, using the monitor, and then swap. Guess what happened: resolution was ok for a split second, and then it crashed down to the 1024×768 world of inferiority here (and yes, I’ve been a geek/nerd long enough to remember days when I didn’t even dream of such resolutions). The TV didn’t get recognised by my Ubuntu install (although it did previously on the netbook, weird).

Solution for Ubuntu:

1. Compute a new modeline for the desired resolution with cvt
   cvt 1920 1080
2. Enter this new mode using xrandr –newmode
   xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_60" 173.00 1920 2048 2248 2576 1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync
3. Add this new mode to your current output connection
   xrandr --addmode VGA1 1920x1080_60

The values listed are for my case, YMMV.

Edit: not related, but still: seems I need to set the audio delay in VLC-player to -300ms. I figured it’d vary depending on .. well, whatever, but it seems to be rather constantly lagging just a tad behind the video. Not a problem, but weird anyway. Solutions welcome!

Focus follows mouse, but too closely. Basically, if you have focus follows mouse, your alt+tab behaviour is getting screwy. Alt+tab works if the mouse is not over a window, but otherwise, it almost always doesn’t work. Which sucks. To the point where I’m considering going back to click-to-focus as opposed to point-to-focus (recall that I fixed windows to do point-to-focus… windows can be hacked to do this, Unix was doing this, but Ubuntu is now broken. Boo le hoo!).

edit: more relevant bug(?).
edit: I complained about this before :).

It’s gone in the new Ubuntu (blame Gnome). Used up by a resize handle. Which I don’t want. Apparently, there’s a way to get rid of this, see here. Untested for now!
Edit: tested, it works. To recap: make sure the following is in your $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0:

style "default-style"
{
  GtkWindow::resize-grip-height = 0
  GtkWindow::resize-grip-width = 0
}

class "GtkWidget" style "default-style"

There’s a focus bug in the latest Ubuntu (basically, in the Compiz package, but who cares about specifics ;-). Basically, if you select “focus follows mouse”, your mouse will uniquely determine the focus. Always. Previously, the mouse would only change focus on window entry.

In other words: Alt+Tab only works in the new Ubuntu if the mouse isn’t over any window. Which is usually not the case.
Bug report here. I hope it gets fixed soon, it annoys me daily – I use Alt+Tab. Often. :s

I finally decided to update my ageing Ubuntu install (the one on the home computer) to 10.04(.1), Ubuntu’s latest-but-one release. So why not update to the latest and greatest in one go? Well, first things first: let’s see how this works out before taking the plunge further. On top of that, 10.04 is a Long Term Support release. Most of them aren’t but the long-term support releases are supported for 3 years instead of one year. Meaning you get all the security updates until you deserve a new computer :)

So, the update. I was somewhat worried, as my internet-via-usb-modem was hard to get working. In fact, it originally required a connection to internet to get it working… :s. In the midst of the update (which took several hours — Ubuntu: what gives?? I can understand it’s more than a 10 minute process, but hours?? where previously, there would be some poignant questions on keeping data at more or less random times during upgrade?!? but I digress…) the internet connection suddenly gave out. Note, I write “midst of the update”. That is actually a bare-faced lie — though I thought it was close to true at the time. I fiddled around, internet did not come back. Luckily, the upgrade process marched onwards without a connection (this happened after all packaged had been downloaded, but it still made me quite nervous). After the reboot, I kept my fingers crossed. Hoorah! Internet worked!

… or did it? Youtube broke, but that was easily fixed by removing and installing flash. Weird that that was necessary, it worked before. On top of that, Internet had lost its speed. It was as slow as a penguin in the desert. A quick google hinted that the problem might be related to IPv6. The easiest potential fix was apparently to tell the browser to not use that. I did (muck around in about:config, find the IPv6 setting and tell it to drop IPv6), and my internet got back into racing gear :)

So: updated, running a long term support release, and some of the important chinks have been checked and addressed. Still need to complete checking though… If I find more, I’ll let you know!

OpenOffice is a nice product. It provides a working alternative to MS Office, is for free, and is constantly improving (unfortunately, it needed lots of improving and it still needs some improving). Best of all, it can read those nasty MS Office files… until Microsoft changed the format again.

Yes, my current ubuntu installs are a bit behind the times. No biggie, but when someone sends you an XLSX file (Excel 2007) and your OpenOffice 3.1 chokes on it… meuh. I googled and googled… OpenOffice v3.0 and above should be able to open XLSX files. Well guess what Sherlock, it no worky work.

So after a short while of fruitless googling for solutions to my problem, I decided to google instead for how to update your OpenOffice to the latest greatest. See here. Caveat: it uninstalls some packages, including ASpell — you’ll probably want that back.

And that fixed the issue. Hoorah for OpenOffice, the latest version does what was promised a few versions ago ;-)

Nice, I just spotted 2 firefox tips. One: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/plugincheck/ — check if your plugins are up to date. Nice!
Two: you can disallow JavaScript to move / resize your windows. I knew there was a option (Edit > Preferences > Content) to enable/disable JavaScript, but if you click the “advanced” button there, you can have JS while disallowing all sorts of nasty behaviour. Makes for a more happy me :)
(Forgot where I got this from btw, let me check… here)