And what’s best is you don’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get munin up and running. In this tutorial you will see how to get your Munin server up and running and monitoring your system and a sample client configuration that will monitor a client node. As you might expect, I will continue to build upon the Ubuntu Server series and install Munin on a Ubuntu 9.04 installation. NOTE: This same installation will work on Ubuntu 9.10 as well.Server installation/configuration

Installing Munin on the Ubunter server is simple. Open up a terminal window (or log into your server console) and issue the command:

sudo apt-get install munin

The above command will also install munin-node which is the client-side software. This is fine, so let it happen. Upon installation Munin will install the configuration files in /etc/munin, the executable in /etc/init.d/, and the web files in /var/www/munin.

The first thing that will need to be done is to configure your server correctly. Open up the /etc/munin/munin.conf file and look for this section:

dbdir     /var/lib/munin
htmldir    /var/www/munin/
logdir     /var/log/munin
rundir     /var/run/munin

Out of the box, this will work just fine.  But if you have any other needs that would dictate any of these directives change, change them here.

The next section to look for is this:

# a simple host tree
[localhost.localdomain]
address 127.0.0.1
use_node_name yes

What the above section does is monitor the server Munin is installed on. This configuration only needs to change if you have specific requirements. Also, if you need to add a client (node), this is where you add it.

In order to instruct Munin to monitor a remote machine you need to add a new host tree. Say, for instance, you want to monitor a machine on the IP addres 192.168.1.150. To do this you would add:

[MACHINE NAME]
address 192.168.1.150
use_node_name yes

Where MACHINE NAME is a name to indicate the job (or user, or department, etc) of the machine.

Once you have these configurations and save the file. Now to move on to the /etc/munin/munin-node.conf file. There is only one configuration you would need to add in order to monitor nodes. Look for this line:

allow ^127\.0\.0\.1$

Beneath this line you will want to add (in order to enable our new node):

allow ^192\.168\.1\.1$

Save this file and restart the Munin server with the command:

/etc/init.d/munin restart

Installing for client

All you need to do for your client is to install the munin-node package. To do this issue the command:

sudo apt-get install munin-node

On the client machine. Now start munin-node with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/munin-node start

Munin will begin to monitor this client now.

The graphs

When all is up and running, point your browser to http://ADDRESS_TO_SERVER/munin/

Figure 1

Where ADDRESS_TO_SERVER is the actual address of the server. Very shortly after you install Munin you may only see a listing of the nodes being watched (see Figure 1). This is okay, it will take some time before data is actually collected.

After a while you will notice data collected and graphs developing. If you click on the localhost.localdomain link you will see data beginning to collect (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

Final thoughts

Munin is a very powerful tool that allows you to gather crucial data about your systems and networks. Now that you have Munin installed and running you can begin to extend the server by adding more and more clients as well as plugins. You will quickly find Munin to be a very valuable tool for data analysis on your various systems and networks.

Related posts

• How to install Nagios on Ubuntu server (10)
• With Ubuntu 9.10 Arrives Wubi 9.10 (2)
• Why you should switch your parents pc to ubuntu (20)
• Which Ubuntu Derivative Is Right For You? (16)
• What makes Ubuntu so user friendly? (47)

The first thing you will want to do is check the Sane supported scanner listing on the Sane Project site. But don’t let your scanner not being on that list stop you. My Epson Perfection V30 was not on the list and I still managed to get it working with the help of iscan. The iscan package is a simple scanning tool for Epson scanners.  You can find the iscan tool within Synaptic. The iscan tool also integrates perfectly into The GIMP, so all your image needs can be met within one tool. But iscan is not the only option. There is also the Xsane tool, which is far more powerful than iscan. Let’s take a look at both of these scanning utilities to see how scanning is handled under the Linux operating system.

NOTE: This article is not going to cover getting your scanner to work under Linux. If your scanner is not listed in the Sane hardware listing, your best bet is to google your model numer and your distribution. For example, in my case I would google epson perfection v30 ubuntu 9.10. You should come up with results that will tell you what approximate drivers to use to get your scanner working.

iscan

Figure 1

We’ll first look at iscan. This tool is, by far, the easier of the two tools to use. And, like its bigger brother XSane, it integrates perfectly with The GIMP. That doesn’t mean you have to use iscan from within The GIMP. Once installed you will find iscan within the Graphics sub menu of the Applications menu. The entry will be called “Image Scan!” (No quotes). Or, if you’d rather, you can start iscan from within The Gimp by going to the File menu, then to the Create sub menu, and selecting the “Scanning (iscan)” entry. Both will start the iscan interface.

When you fire up iscan you will notice how simple the interface is (see Figure 1). This scanner utility is just as easy to use as any Windows or Mac utility. The only configuration option for iscan is your print command. That is how simple this tool is.

With your picture in your scanner hit the Preview button to first get a preview of your image. Once the image is up you can then select the portion of the image you want to scan, select the Destination (either file or printer), and click the Scan button. When you click the Scan button you will be asked to give the file a name. The scanner will then do it’s job and save the file for you. It’s that simple.

XSane

Figure 2

XSane can be found in your distributions repositories. So whether you use Ubuntu or Fedoar (or anything in between), you should be able to open up your distributions Add/Remove Software tool and find XSane easily. XSane, like iscan, is a graphical frontend for the Sane project. But XSane is a bit more serious of a tool. You can see (in Figure 2) there is much more to XSane than your average scanning tool. In Figure 2 you see the standard windows that open along with the Main window. Pictured are the  Main windows (far left), Preview window (center), Standard Options window (top right), and Histogram (lower right). You can also include an Advanced Options window, and a Batch Scan window.

But even with all of the extra options, acquiring a scan with XSane is just as simple as with iscan. Follow these directions:

1. Place your photo on the scanner.
2. Open XSane.
3. Click the Aquire preview button in the Preview window.
4. Adjust the size, rotation, and scale at the bottom of the Preview window.
5. Adjust the color in the Main window.
6. Select the file type in the Main window.
7. Adjust the scan resultion in the Main window.
8. Click the Scan button in the Main window.

When the scan is complete a new window will open that allows you to further adjust your image. In this window you can apply a despeckle or blur filter, adjust the geometry, rotate the image, clone image, do optical character  recognition, and save the image.

And what about the Histogram window? This window allows you to fine-tune the color of your image. You use this tool after you preview and before you scan. You will be suprised at how well you can perfect the color of your scans with this tool.

Final thoughts

For my preferences, I lean toward XSane to handle my scanning tasks. But iscan does the job quite well. Either tool will allow you to take advantage of that flatbed scanner you have in your office while using Linux. One less excuse to continue using Windows. ;-)

Related posts

• Document Scanning With Digital Cameras (5)

Of course, ideally, you will want to install XBMC on a machine intended for multi-media use. It will work on lower-end video cards, but the interface will be somewhat slower. For a complete listing of supported hardware check out the XBMC hardware page. Now, let’s get on with the installation.

Ubuntu

I will give you a warning here: The most recently supported Ubuntu is 8.10. That does not, however, mean it will not install on anything later. I have XBMC installed and working fine on Ubuntu 9.04. With that in mind here are the installation steps for Ubuntu.

Open up your /etc/apt/sources.list file and add the following to the end:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main

Save that file and then issue the command:

sudo apt-get update

Once the update is complete issue the following command:

sudo apt-get install xbmc

If you want to install extra skins, issue this command:

sudo apt-get install xbmc-skin-*

Figure 1

You will find the XBMC menu entry in the Sound And Video sub-menu of the Applications menu. When XBMC opens you will see a very user-friendly interface (see Figure 1).

Now it’s time for a less than user-friendly installation. Because there have been no rpm files created for Fedora, the installation requires a number of steps which will lead you to compiling XBMC. These steps will work for Fedora 8, 9, and 10 as well as CentOS 5.2. Here we go. NOTE: You will need to be the root user for this installation.

If you don’t already have Subversion install, do so now with the command:

yum install subversion

Once Subversion is installed, check out XBMC from subversion with the command:

svn co https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk

Now install the rpmfusion repository with one of the following commands:

Fedora:

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

and

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rmpfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

CentOS 5 (32 bit):
rpm -Uvh http://apt.sw.be/redhat/e15/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.e15.rf.i386.rpm

CentOS 5 (64 bit):

rpm -Uvh http://apt.sw.be/redhat/e15/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.e15.rf.x86_64.rpm

Now the fun begins. This installation command is all one line:
yum install SDL* glew glew-devel libmad-devel tre tre-devel libogg libogg-devel libvorbis libvorbis-devel boost boost-devel bzip2-devel bzip2-libs fribidi* lzo lzo-devel mysql-libs mysql-devel jasper jasper-devel faac faac-devel enca enca-devel hal hal-devel hal-libs cmake gperf nasm libXmu-devel fontconfig-devel freetype-devel libXinerama-devel pcre-devel gcc-c++ sqlite-devel curl-devel mysql-devel libcdio-devel libmms-devel faad2-devel flac-devel libsmbclient-devel libXtst-devel

The next step creates a symbolic link for the libmysqlclient.so file. The command is one of these two (depending upon your architecture):

For i386:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.15.0.0 /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.so

For x64:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.15.0.0 /usr/lib64/libmysqlclient.so

Now cd into the XBMC directory (should be in the directory you are currently working in) and issue the following commands:

./bootstrap

and

./configure

and

make

If you see an error related to jpegint.h, then you might have to issue the following command:

cp XBMC/xbmx/lib/cximage-6.0/jpeg/jpegint.h /usr/include

If you have to issue the above command, then issue the make command again.

Finally issue the command:

make install

And XBMC will install.

On Fedora distributions you might have an issue with SELinux. If so you will need to issue the following commands:
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/local/share/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avutil-50-i486-linux.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/local/share/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avcodec-52-i486-linux.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/local/share/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avformat-52-i486-linux.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/local/share/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/swscale-0.6.1-i486-linux.so'

That’s it for the Fedora/CentOS installation. You should find XBMC in your Video menu. If you can’t seem to find a menu entry you can always enter xbmc in either a terminal window or the run dialog.

Final thoughts

XBMC is an outstanding media center software. It will play your CDs and DVDs flawlessly. If you have the hardware for this software, it is a much better solution than most other Linux video solutions.

Related posts

• Xbox Media Center Cross Platform Alpha (2)
• XBMC Media Center Final (13)
• The perfect multimedia device (3)
• Ten Video Sharing Services Compared (1)
• SMPlayer 0.5.51 (17)

Amazon recently started exporting the Kindle to other countries, so I bought one. Amazon struggled to negotiate deals with European carriers, which was one reason why the Kindle was not already available to the European market, so instead, the Kindle roams from the AT&T network.

The features are fairly similar to those available to American customers. One can subscribe to and download newspapers, magazines and buy and and download books. One can’t, however, download the images inside the newspapers and magazines, browse the Web or subscribe to blogs. This is all down through a mobile internet connection, either 3G/GPRS.

The 3G coverage in my house is somewhat intermittent, although I still think it is just about tolerable. I find a 2G signal perfectly reasonable for downloading a book or browsing the Kindle store. I initially thought it strange that the Kindle lacks WiFi, unlike many of its competitors, but I have since realised that WiFi is unneeded.

As the mobile internet coverage is included in the purchase price of the Kindle, Amazon prevent users from browsing the web on it outside the US due to the high costs they would face. This would prove annoying to some users, although I imagine web browsing on the Kindle would prove clumsy, due to fact it’s black and white.

The Kindle can also play MP3s, so audiobooks, music and podcasts can be placed on it. I believe that you need to connect the Kindle to a computer to transfer them onto it. For books, magazines and newspapers, no computer is needed. Files can be coverted into Kindle format by emailing it to an address that will automatically send them to the Kindle (at 0.99USD/MB), by using a free Kindle email conversion service and transferring the files via USB, or by using software like Calibre. The Kindle handles the Mobipocket format, so you can get free public domain books from websites like Feedbooks and transfer them on.

The battery life is very good, due to the way text is displayed. E Ink, which the Kindle employs, has extremely low energy consumption. If you turn the wireless off, it can keep going for weeks without being charged. Charging takes a couple of hours, although the charger supplied is a US socket. It does charge via USB so this isn’t an issue.

It has a couple of other nice touches, too. One can annotate texts, have them read aloud via a text-to-speech feature (although this doesn’t work very well) and has a very attractive standby screen which rotates between different images of different writers and writing-related objects.

The International Kindle costs $260, plus postage and import tax. Altogether, mine cost around $340. This is equivalent to about £210 or €225; roughly the same as its competitors. The mobile internet is a big selling point which many competitors lack. They are only purchasable from Amazon.com, so any discounts or vouchers you may have for other Amazon sites won’t work. Also, books are only available from Amazon.com, so you pay notice the absence of the work of your country’s authors. I hope that eventually we will be able to relink our Kindles to our own national Amazon sites, although there is no certainty (or even indication) that Amazon will permit this.

Related posts

• Amazon Deletes Books From Kindle Without User Consent (7)
• Txtr Ebook Reader (16)
• New Samsung Android Phone, T-Mobile Project Dark Plans Leaked, NASDAQ And Amazon Release iPhone Apps (0)
• Manage Ebook Collections With Calibre (13)
• Wikipedia on your iPod (1)

Banshee is strongly tied to the GNOME desktop manager. These two together make managing your Android phone music as simple as it gets. Now, Banshee is not a complete replacement for iTunes. There is no way to purchase music through Banshee (which is fine because most Android phones can purchase music straight from the Amazon MP3 market). But Banshee does a bang up job of managing your music – and a simple job interacting with the Android phone. Now, let’s take a look at how this is done.

Installing Banshee

If you don’t already have Banshee installed you will need to do so. And you will need to make sure you have a version >= 1.4. To install go to your Add/Remove Software tool and follow these steps:

1. Search for “banshee” (no quotes).
2. Select Banshee for installation.
3. Click Apply to install.

That’s it.

Now that Banshee is installed, you are ready to have Banshee and your Android working together.

Connecting your Android

Figure 1

When you connect your Android phone to your Linux machine you will be asked (on the phone) if you want to mount your SD card. Go ahead and do that so your Linux machine can see the SD card on the phone. This SD card will show up in the Nautilus file manager (shown in Figure 1) as a 2.0 GB Media. You can actually drag and drop files to this directory – but we’re managing music, so we’re going to use Banshee and not a file manager.

Now open up Banshee and your Android phone will automatically show up (see Figure 2).

As you can see, the interface gives you a clear view of the space

Figure 2

available on your phone’s card. You can also see that there are two options:

Manually sync

Automatically sync

Most likely you will want to manually sync your phone. If your Banshee library is like mine there is WAY more music than will fit on a 2 Gig card. of course you can replace that 2 Gig card with a much larger card and then have Banshee automatically sync.

For manually syncing all you need to do is navigate through your music collection and then drag and drop the files you want to put on your phone.

Upon completion of the music management you can then click the Eject Android G1 Phone button in the upper right corner of Banshee. Now, before you actually unplug your phone from your computer you need to turn off USB storage on your phone. Once USB storage is off you can then unplug your phone and check to make sure your new music is present and accounted for.

Final thoughts

I certainly hope the Linux community and the Android community can work together further so that the Linux operating system can enjoy a complete sync. Once this happens wireless companies can be sure that Linux users/fans will flock to their Android offerings.

Related posts

• The Plot Thickens Around The Google Phone (2)
• The HTC Dragon Exists And Google Has It! (1)
• T-Mobile myTouch (5)
• Spring Design’s Alex And B&N’s Nook (6)
• Sony Ericsson’s XPERIA X10: Review (9)

The most interesting of the lot are definitely the new iMacs and the multi-touch mouse. The new Quad-Core iMac was heard coming long before, when the first rumors started circulating last month. Now that it is finally here, the differences from the old models are obvious. It has a stunning 27” display, Intel Core i5 (upgradable to Core i7) and has a huge screen space at 2560×1440 pixels.

But the excitement is not restricted to the highest model. The main thing that I would like to bring your attention to is the fact that all models (except the quad core) have Intel Core 2 Duo chips at 3.09GHz and have 4GB memory as standard. Plus, there is the brilliant new wireless Magic Mouse and wireless new keyboard that come standard with every iMac.

The Magic mouse is a brilliant piece of equipment. It has no buttons, is made out of aluminum and is topped off with a capacitive multitouch layer that works just like the MacBook’s glass trackpad. You can touch anywhere and you can scroll the full 360º if the application allows it. The whole surface clicks like the glass trackpad and you can even get it to emulate the two-button mouse. I say this is the best non-gaming mouse till date. Plus the tracking is now optical, so the Magic Mouse can track without a mousepad and on almost all surfaces. Gestures are supported and so is accelerated scrolling. So comparisons to the iPhone’s multitouch features are fully justified.

The MacBook gets a polycarbonate unibody, with the same built-in battery as the MacBook Pro line. So it now has a 7-hour rated battery life. There have been subtle design changes – the most noticeable is the lack of the sharp edge that really bugged people on the previous models. The display is now LED backlit, making the MacBook more eco-friendly and energy efficient.

MacMinis have received speed and storage upgrades but everything else is pretty much the same. There is now a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo, $999 server edition that packs in two 500GB HDDs, Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard and lacks a DVD burner.

So now that we know what Apple had up their sleeves, it is time to talk about how this will help them in their race against Windows 7 and the slew of new computers that will be released during and soon after the Windows 7 launch.

Apple’s new strategy with iMacs is clearly to give users as much computing power as possible. The new entry point of 3.06 GHz and 4GB RAM is going to be a hit with the crowd because these are above average features at this time. So buying an iMac now would be a great thing because you will not have to upgrade for quite a while.

The new 27” Core ‘5/i7 iMac is clearly an attempt to woo those professionals who want something more affordable than a Mac Pro but something more powerful that the previous generation iMacs. This new iMac is going to be a hit with visual designers and also with musicians. Both have a lot of use for large screen spaces. Designers can do side by side comparisons while musicians can now see more things on screen. I for one would use this with Logic Pro and place the mixer and the arrangement areas side by side during the final mix down.

The two Mac Minis And the MacBook [white] have been through smaller updates. They are not very different spec-wise but the MacBook has changed quite a bit physically. It doesn’t seem like they will make much of an impact on their own but the price cuts are sure to bring in some more sales. To me, it seems like 2010 Q10 will be the bigger quarter for Apple and they will one-up Windows 7 with their tablet device. So this it for now and I don’t think the new Macs and Windows 7 will suffer a lot from each other. That is because the high-end will still go for MacBook Pros and iMacs and the average consumer will be torn between the Mac Mini and myriad Windows 7 systems. However, the MacBook [white] is likely to make it to quite a few stockings this year.

Related posts

• XNJB: Transfer music to and from a MTP MP3 player on a Mac (0)
• Winamp iPod Plugin (0)
• Winamp iPod Plugin (5)
• Wikipedia on your iPod (1)
• Why Apple needs a Tablet PC (5)

With the help of the GNOME Nettools you can have a sweet collection of powerful tools that will help you to troubleshoot your network in no time. And this collection of tools is all wrapped up into a user-friendly graphical interface. So without any further adieu, let’s take a look at this powerful suite of tools.

Features

The GNOME Nettools includes the following tools:

• Devices: Have all information about your networking devices at your fingertips.
• Ping: Get detailed information using the ping tool.
• Netstat: Get detailed information about your routing table, active network services, and multicast information about your machine.
• Traceroute: Trace the path to a network host.
• Port scan: Scan for open ports on servers and desktops.
• Lookup: Get detailed information about a server.
• Finger: Lookup a users finger entry.
• Whois: Lookup a whois entry for a domain.

GNOME Nettools also features:

• Copy information to text report.
• Help system.
• Drop downs for previously entered addresses/domains.
• Easy to use GUI.

Now let’s take a look and see how this tool is used.

Usage

Figure 1

As you can see there has been no mention of installation. That is because GNOME Nettools is installed by default. In order to start up the tool you only have to go to the Administration sub-menu of the System menu. Once you have fired up the tool you will be greeted with main window at the Devices tab. This tab is where you gather the information about your installed networking devices. As you can see (In Figure 1) there is plenty of detailed information about my default eth0 interface. You can switch this to display information about any connected internet device you have on the machine by using the Interface drop-down.

The next tab, Ping, is where you can actually start troubleshooting networking issues. Ping is almost always one of the first tools I use, but I generally use it in command line form. Since most new Linux users prefer to not use the command line – you can still get your ping on with Nettools. Click on the Ping tab to reveal how the Ping tool works (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

By default the Nettools Ping tool will be configured for a limited 5 requests. You can up that number or even change it to an unlimited number if you need. In Figure 2 I have sent 5 ping requests to an internal server and received 100% sucess on my packets. I know this server is at least responding.

The other tools will all work exactly as you would expect them. One thing that is nice is as a tool is working you can switch over to another tool without disrupting the original tools task. This is especially nice when running a traceroute that can take a while (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

The traceroute tool will follow a path, hop for hop, to a destination you enter. In Figure 3 I ran a traceroute on www.google.com which ended before it reached its goal. This, of course, was only to show you the output of the traceroute (as there is not much I can personally do if my route to www.google.com is stopped outside of the boundaries of my network or my service providers network. But it gives you an idea of where the route stops. If this were a corporate issue, and the destination was one I had to reach, I would know precisely where the last known successful hop was (in the case of Figure 3 – after the 65.222.158.82 address).

I can then use the Whois tool to discover who is connected to that address. By clicking on the Whois tab and then entering the IP address above I receive the following information:

MCI Communications Services, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business UUNET65 (NET-65-192-0-0-1)
65.192.0.0 - 65.223.255.255
SPLICE COMMUNICATIONS, INC. UU-65-222-158-80-D4 (NET-65-222-158-80-1)
65.222.158.80 - 65.222.158.87

If www.google.com were a critical address for me (and my company) to reach for work (or a host of my company’s web site) I could at least contact the owner of this domain.

Final thoughts

As you would expect, the rest of the Nettools tools work in a very similar fashion than their command line counter parts. The only difference? You don’t have to open up a terminal window to use them. No commands to remember, no commands to type. Just easy network analysis, with the help of a user-friendly GUI tool.

Related posts

• Ways to check if a website is really down (12)
• Internet Maniac Networking Software (2)
• eToolz Network Toolset (1)
• Who shares your shared hosting? (5)
• WebHopper Internet Traceroute Tool (2)

There were many reasons behind it failing and they were there because the concept was way ahead of the available and affordable consumer technology at that time.

So now that we are on the brink of another tablet from the company, I would like to tone down all our expectations a little and give you a dose of practicality in this post.

• The OS Problem – The tablet will be a very unique device. It is exactly halfway between the iPhone and the MacBooks. So there are two choices for Apple – scale up the iPhone OS or scale down OS X. Logically, scaling down the full sized OS X would pose a lot of problems in terms of expectations and engineering. Scaling up the iPhone OS makes much more sense. But then, what do you tell the app devs? Here’s a new iPhone OS resolution and specs, make apps for it? The third choice is making a whole new OS. But that would mean forcing users to learn something new and making things more complicated (three OS’ to maintain). We are lazy people.

• The Portability Problem – Would you really like to carry around a 10.6inch glass tablet? I thought not. It will fracture all too easily. This structural problem can only be overcome by making A) a tough lid for it or B) a touchscreen built out of shatterproof, bulletproof, extra tough glass that can take a straight punch to the face and stay intact. The second option would make the device far too expensive and the first would make it the lid an almost redundant piece. Detachable or not, it would not be very helpful about the portability and usability.

• Weight And Battery Life – All that screen space and whatever the processing power is, requires power. And everyone knows that more battery power means more weight. So what would you rather have? A 3-cell battery that does not last long or a 9-cell battery that makes it impossible to carry the device for too long? And let’s not talk about the screen brightness. Forget working under direct sunlight; let’s see this device remain workable in a brightly lit room without dying in an hour.

• Processing Power and Performance – With battery life already an issue, one must  wonder – how much processing power would this tablet have? Something around 600MHz like the iPhone 3GS just won’t cut it for this large a device. You need to have something fairly muscle-bound, like an Intel ULV or Atom at the very least. Now think of a netbook and think of the frustratingly sluggish performance. Apple would probably need to artificially block multi-tasking on the tablet as well. Bummer.

• Usability – Will someone please tell me how the hell am I supposed to use this tablet? I am almost certain that I can’t hold in one hand because it will be too heavy. Besides, I would really like to use both hands on a 10.6inch touchscreen. Also, Apple would be loath to include a kickstand on the device, which would totally destroy the aesthetics of the curved and polished back that it apparently has. So the only remaining way is to keep it on a flat surface parallel to the ground and bend over to use it. As a blogger I already spend too much time sitting badly and getting backaches. I could live without more. So unless Apple makes this thing levitate in mid air, this does not look very useful to me.

Of course, knowing Apple and dear Stevie, each of these reasons has already caused a total reset. So hopefully, we will see another masterpiece from Apple early next year. And if it fails, you read about it at gHacks!

Related posts

• Why Apple needs a Tablet PC (5)
• Hot Today: The iSlate Strikes Back, Thanks To More Apple Tablet Rumors (2)
• Apple Update: The Apple Temple At 67th Broadway, Big Cash, Tablet Ahoy And More (0)
• XNJB: Transfer music to and from a MTP MP3 player on a Mac (0)
• Winamp iPod Plugin (0)

But why would you want to speed up your drive when modern drives are already fast enough? Some Linux installations default to slower defaults which, effectively, slow down your drives. Of course using such a tool must come with a warning. WARNING: Using hdparm incorrectly could cause corruption of data.

You do not have to worry about installing hdparm as it should already be installed by default. The basic usage of hdparm is:

hdparm [OPTIONS] [DEVICE]

Of course, by DEVICE, I mean in the Linux vernacular which will be something like /dev/hda.

To get the basic information about your drive you would issue the command:

hdparm /dev/HDA

Where HDA is the actual name of the hard drive you want to work with.

When I run the command:

sudo hdparm /dev/hda

I see the following:

jlwallen@jlwallen-laptop:~$ sudo hdparm /dev/hda
[sudo] password for jlwallen:
/dev/hda:

multcount     =  8
using_dma     =  0
IO_support    =  0 (default)
readonly      =  0 (off)
readahead     = 256 (on)
geometry      = 19457/255/63, sectors = 312581808, start = 0

What is really important in the above output is the IO_Support line. It is set to 0 which is 16-bit. Modern drives support IO mode 1 which is 32-bit mode. By changing this you can nearly double the throughput of your hard drive. But how exactly do you set this? Patience. Before we make this change we want to test the speeds of our drive. To run a standard test issue the command:

sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/HDA

Where SDA is the actual location of your drive. The results should look something like:

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads:   868 MB in  2.00 seconds = 434 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  68 MB in  3.01 seconds =  22.52 MB/sec

As you can see the speeds are so-so at best, so let’s kick them up a notch. To do the following:

Enable DMA

Change the IO mode from 16-bit to 32-bit.

Change the maximum number of disk sectors to transfer in a single request.

issue the command:

sudo hdparm -d1 -c1 -m16 /dev/hda

Now when I issue the command:

sudo hdparm /dev/hda

I see:

jlwallen@jlwallen-laptop:~$ sudo hdparm /dev/hda
[sudo] password for jlwallen:
/dev/hda:

multcount     =  16 (on)
using_dma     =  1 (on)
IO_support    =  1 (32-bit)
readonly      =  0 (off)
readahead     = 256 (on)
geometry      = 19457/255/63, sectors = 312581808, start = 0

When the drive speeds are tested now, they should nearly be doubled.

What about SATA?

Naturally there is a tool for the same tricks, but for SATA drives. The sdparm tool is similar in use to the hdparm tool. The sdparm tool, however, is a bit more complex and not nearly as necessary as most SATA drives will give you pretty swift throughput. If you want to use sdparm you will notice that it is not installed by default. You can install sdparm with the command:

sudo apt-get install sdparm

I will dive into sdparm at a later date.

Final thoughts

If you are dealing with older, slower ATA/IDE drives you will probably notice a significant improvement when you use hdparm to speed up your throughput. Give this a go, but I suggest testing it on a non-production machine first.

Related posts

• No related posts.

Phoenix have developed a new technology that they call Phoenix Instant Boot. The new technology cuts down the time it takes for the Bios to initialize everything to one second. This is achieved by loading devices and processes that are needed to load the operating system simultaneously. Take a look at the following video that has been posted to Youtube that showcases the boot time.

The notebook used in the demonstration video was powered by a high-performance solid state disk. It took about ten seconds to boot into Windows 7. While boot time is definitely not the only thing that counts it is nice to see some progress in this area. It is even possible, according to Phoenix, that some hardware manufacturers will offer Bios upgrades that incorporate the technology.

Related posts

• Disney Netpal (8)
• What You Should Do After Buying A New Computer System (18)
• Web Browser Have Impact On Battery Life (1)
• Turn Off Computer Hardware With A Single Click (6)
• Track your stolen computer with Locate PC (10)

Now there are loads of tools to use for this purpose. I have already covered the Unetbootin tool in my article “Install Linux on a USB drive with Unetbootin.” This time around we are going to do the same trick with a tool that comes pre-installed on any modern Ubuntu distribution. It’s all graphical interface and all easy going.

What you will need

• A USB drive with at least 700 MB in size.
• Either an ISO image or the Ubuntu Live CD

And a little bit of time. If you don’t have either the ISO image or the CD you can just download a fresh copy from the Ubuntu site.

Once you have everything you need, you are ready to go.

Starting the tool

Figure 1

You will find the USB creator in the Administration sub-menu of the System menu on the GNOME desktop. The entry you are looking for is called “USB Startup Disk Creator”. Click that to open up the main window (see Figure 1).

As you can see (in Figure 1) there is neither an image or a CD listed. You either have to insert your Ubuntu CD or, if you’re using a downloaded image, click the Other button and navigate to where you’ve saed your image file.

When you insert your CD it will be automatically detected by the system and listed in the USB Startup Disk window. When this happens everything that is greyed out in Figure 1 will be at your service.

You will notice the only option available is for saving documents and settings. If your USB drive has enough extra space you can designate a portion of that drive for this purpose. With this feature you can effectively have a portable version of Linux that is far more than just a “startup disk”.

Creating the disk

Figure 2

When you have selected your image to use and configured your free space you are ready to go. Click the Make Startup Disk button and the main windo will be dismissed. During the creation process you will see a progress window (see Figure 2) that will let you know how much is done and what is happening. The phases of this creation are:

• Copying Files
• Creating persistence file
• Making persistence file system

Once all three phases are complete you will get a dialog window telling you installation is complete and you can now reboot your machine with the USB drive. Of course when you boot a machine with this device it has to be able to boot from a USB device. Most modern machine can do that so it shouldn’t be an issue.

Final thoughts

As far as tools of this nature, the Ubuntu USB disk creator tool is one of the easiest and most reliable. It’s not the most flexible; but for what it does, you can’t beat it. If you’re looking to have a portable Ubuntu distribution you can carry with you, make use of this user-friendly tool.

Related posts

• USB Flash Drives: USB Vaccine (6)
• USB Flash Drive with Capacity Meter (3)
• USB Drive Letter Manager (2)
• Security Applications that run on Usb Drives (0)
• Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager (6)

I’m usually favoring the “second-best” part or device over the best, e.g. not the latest and greatest video card for $600+ but one for $300 that is not super fast but still fast enough for everything.

Usage:

I need the PC for blogging and research on the Internet mainly. I want to view movies and listen to music. I also want to work with Visual Studio and play some games with friends every now and then.

Components:

CPU: Intel I7 9xx or 8xx. If you have other suggestions or favor a specific processor let me know
Computer Memory: 8GB or more
Motherboard: No favorite yet. Do not need a lot of extras like firewire, bluetooth, infrared connections on the board. Should have a fast network connection build in.
Video Card: No idea. Do not want to pay more than $300 for the video card. I currently have a ATI 4870. Are there any DirectX 11 cards out there yet? Video card should not make a lot of noise.
Hard Drives: I need at least 2 Terabyte. No more than two hard drives. Currently thinking about getting two 1.5 Terabyte drives. Hard drives should not make lots of noise. More important than speed to me. I do not need Raid but I though about having a faster boot hard drive and two slower data drives. Would you favor a fast hard drive (or two in Raid) or SSD drive for that task?
SSD Drives: I’m not sure if I want an SSD drive. Are there any next gen SSD drives out there that do not get slower over time?
Sound Card: Not necessarily needed but if there is a good one for little money I take it. Otherwise it should be onboard sound.
Case: Mid-tower is fine. I do not care about color but it should have a few connectors on the front (e.g. USB)
Power Unit: It has to be quiet. Should supply enough power though for the computer system.
Computer Monitor: Do not need one

Did I leave anything out? I’m keen to read your suggestions. I also do not have a problem waiting another few months before I build the system in case some ubercool hardware comes out in that time that is worth waiting for.

Related posts

• Power Supply Calculator (13)
• Building a PC March Progress (5)
• Zombie City Tactics (0)
• WinShake Adds Aero Peek And Share To Windows Vista and XP (2)
• Windows Media Player Light (2)

GASP!

Never fear, it’s not that hard. Just a few commands and you’ll be up and running with your new hard drive installed on your server. This article will assume the physical drive is already installed on your machine.

I am going to make a couple of assumptions here, for the sake of simplicity for this article. The first assumption is that the new drive will be mounted to the directory /data. The next assumption is that you want this directory to be both readable and writable by all users on the system. Another assumption is that you will want the drive to be formatted with the ext3 file system with just one partition. Finally I will assume you want this drive to be automatically mounted upon boot of the system.

With that out of the way, let’s get down to business.

Once you boot the machine with the new drive log into the console and issue the command:

dmesg

Near the bottom of the output you should see where the disk is located. it will be something like:

/dev/sdb

So let’s assume it is on /dev/sdb.

If you can’t figure it out where the drive is located  with dmesg issue the command:

sudo fdisk -l

The above command will report something like:

/dev/sda1 * 1 18709 150280011 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 18710 19457 6008310 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 18710 19457 6008278+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

But will include a listing for your new drive. If you only see listings for /dev/sda* then your new drive has not been recognized and there is a problem with the physical installation.

Once you know where your drive is located (again we’ll use /dev/sdb for our example) it’s time to create a new directory where this drive will be mounted. We are mounting our drive to the directory /data so we’ll create this directory with the following command:

sudo mkdir /data

Now let’s make it available to all users:

sudo chmod -R 777 /data

With a place to mount the drive, it’s time to format the new drive. The formatting will be done with the command:

sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb

When this is complete you are ready to mount the drive. Before you edit fstab entry (so the drive will be automatically mounted) make sure it can be successfully mounted with the command:

sudo mount /dev/sdb /data

If this is successful let’s create an entry in /etc/fstab. open that file with the command

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Now add the following entry at the end of that file:

/dev/sdb /data ext3 defaults 0 0

Once you save that file, mount the drive (without having to reboot) with the command:

sudo mount -a

To make sure the drive mounted successfully issue the command:

df

The above should include in the report:

/dev/sdb   /data

If that’s the case, success! You can run one file test by trying to write a file to the new drive with the command:

touch /data/test

If you can write that file all is well.

Final thoughts

Yes it is a bit more complicated than adding a new drive when you have GUI tools available, but it’s not anything that can’t be accomplished by the average user. If you are not afraid of the command line, you can add a second drive in Ubuntu with ease.

Related posts

• Which Ubuntu Derivative Is Right For You? (16)
• Use this iptables script for Web/Mail server security (2)
• Understanding Linux /etc/fstab (6)
• Keep logged in users informed with motd (0)
• Installing Ubuntu Server 9.04 (20)

Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) is utilised on a range of devices, but especially so by Creative. Creative Zens (and their variants) utilise the protocol. Whilst the Creative NOMAD isn’t MTP, it too uses an awkward protocol not natively supported by OS X. The infamous Zune (in the eyes of an Apple fanboy) too uses MTP, however, Microsoft make it very difficult to transfer data to.

XNJB is a piece of software that provides a graphical front-end to a libnjb and libmtp: free and open source libraries that allow communication with devices like Creative NOMADs and Creative Zens. Unfortunately, neither support the Zune, due to additional restrictions Microsoft put in place. The libraries work on other POSIX operating systems, like Linux, but XNJB does not.

XNJB allows users to upload and download songs from their media players, for ID3 data to be edited and devices searched. All of this has to be done within the software; it is not integrated into iTunes or Finder.

The transfer of data felt a bit slow to me, but I expect this is primarily due to the messiness of my library and the nature of Media Transfer Protocol.

This software is, however, a useful tool when you first got the Mac. I do, though, doubt you could realistically continue to use a MTP device successfully with OS X. Naturally, you could use it inside Boot Camp or a virtual machine, but in my opinion, that too is not an ideal option.

Compatible devices are listed on their website.

Related posts

• Sync iTunes with non iPod mp3 players (11)
• Sync any mp3 player with iTunes (2)
• Replace iTunes with Floola (12)
• Add Features to your MP3 Player (0)
• Winamp iPod Plugin (0)

Powertop was created by Lesswatts.org with the sole purpose of helping users find those programs and/or systems that are using too much power. The end result? More battery life for you to enjoy. Power top is easy to install and use. Powertop is a curses-based application so it is run inside of a terminal very much like the Top application. Don’t expect a fancy GUI here, it’s text-based but still user-friendly. In this article you will find out how to install Powertop and use it to get the most out of your battery.

Installing Powertop

So long as you are using a modern release, you should find Powertop in your distributions’ repositories. And since Powertop is a terminal-based application, I will illustrate how to install via command line.

The steps are simple:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo install powertop.
3. Click ‘y’ to okay the installation.

That’s it. Powertop is now ready for you to use.

Using Powertop

Figure 1

With your terminal still open issue the command sudo powertop to start the application. You can not run Powertop as the standard user because Powertop has to collect and modify information that the standard user has no access to. Fortunately sudo will do the trick.

What you see will differ, depending upon your distribution, installation, configuration, etc.

As you can see ,in Figure 1, Powertop has a few suggestions to aid my laptop. The biggest issue is wakeups and Powertop is giving me the top causes for wakeups.

As you can also see, Powertop offers suggestions to solve the various problems. Not only does Powertop make suggestions, it will offer to take care of the suggestion for you. In the instance above you can see Powertop is suggesting I disable the hal system from polling my CD drive. You can do this with the command:

hal-disable-polling –device /dev/cdrom

or you can just hit the ‘K’ key and Powertop will take care of this for you.

Once you take care of this suggestion (whether you let Powertop take care of it or you do it manually) Powertop will then suggest another way for you get more power from your laptop and will offer to take care of the issue for you. You can continue on like this until Powertop has resolved every issue it can find.

Final thoughts

Powertop is an effective means of helping your laptop gain more battery life without having to recompile a kernel, manually edit a configuration file, or issue any commands (outside of starting the application). After following the suggestions of Powertop you should experience a noticeable difference in your battery life.

Related posts

• Vista Battery Saver (2)
• SpeedswitchXP Laptop CPU Frequency Control (5)
• Notebook Battery Monitor (9)
• Laptop Battery Monitor BattCursor (3)
• Battery Care Manages Laptop Batteries (4)

Computer repair flowcharts can aid even inexperienced users to analyse the computer hardware problem with the possibility to repair it directly without having to spend money on professional computer repair. The computer repair flowcharts that are available on the website in pdf and image format are part of a computer repair book that contains additional diagnostic flowcharts that are not available on the website.

The following computer repair flowcharts are available for free on the website:

• Power Supply Failure
• Video Card Diagnostics
• CPU, RAM and Motherboard Troubleshooting
• Hard Drive Failure
• CD and DVD Troubleshooting
• Modem Failure
• Sound Card Diagnostics
• Network Troubleshooting

Each computer repair flowchart guides the user through a series of Yes or No questions. The hard drive repair flowchart for example beings by asking if the drive is detected during the boot process and goes from there to cover all eventualities that can lead to a hard drive problem. Computer repair experience or at least some knowledge of computer hardware helps while working with the computer repair flowchart as it sometimes refers to specific computer hardware or features provided by the hardware.

The computer repair charts refer to each other. The Motherboard, CPU and RAM troubleshooting section for instance links to the Power Supply Failure and Video Card Diagnostics flowcharts which means that the user has to open these computer repair charts to continue with the repair.

Related posts

• Rizone’s Power Tools (1)
• Online Network Troubleshooting Analyzer Netalyzr (29)
• Fix Winsock Errors With Winsock Repair (11)
• Computer Repair Utility Kit (18)
• Computer Repair Toolkit For Tech Support (6)

• Port details
• Host details
• State
• Service
• Devices
• Addresses
• and much, much more

Nmap is one of those applications you will need to open anytime you see issues on your network, need to get information about hosts, track down an IP address, etc. Nmap is flexible, powerful, deployed all over the world (it is in the top 10 programs on Freshmeat), easy to use, well documented, cross platform (Linux, OS X, and Windows ) and (best of all) FREE!

But Nmap is a commmand-line only tool. Most users don’t want to monkey with the command line. Fortunately there are plenty of front-end tools for command line equivalents. For Nmap you can use the user-friend Zenmap. And how can you get up to speed quickly with Zenmap? Easy…you read this tutorial on how to run a scan on your entire LAN and then read the results.

Getting and installing

To install Zenmap you will have to install Nmap along with it. You can do this one of two ways: with Synaptic (or another GUI front end for your installation tool), or from the command line. To install via your Add/Remove Software tool follow these steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software utility.
2. Search for Nmap.
3. Mark Nmap for installation.
4. Search for Zenmap.
5. Mark Zenmap for installation.
6. Click Apply to install.

Once installed you will see the entry for Zenmap in your Internet (or Network) sub-menu of your Applications or Main menu. You will want to run Zenmap as the root user because, most likely, your standard user will not have access to the networking devices.

Running Zenmap

Figure 1

When you fire up Zenmap you will see the main window (see Figure 1) which will be empty of scans (because none have been issued as of yet).

To start a new scan you can do one of two things: You can enter a target IP (or range), select the type of scan, and hit Scan. Or you can open up the Command Wizard to construct a much more specific type of scan.

If you opt for just entering in your target(s) here’s how it works. The first thing you do is enter a target IP address. If you want to use a range of addresses the address would look like this: 192.168.1.1-200. NOTE: There are no spaces in the address.

You then need to select the type of scan to run. There are eight different types of scans to run. The intense scan will give you the most information and the Operating System Detection will give you the least amount of information.

The second method of setting up a scan is the Command Wizard. When you click this button you will walk through the following steps:

• Novice/Expert: Select the level of configuration you want to use.
• Profile/Command: Create a new profile or create a command to run once.
• Profile Details: If you go the Profile route you will have to enter the profile details.
• Scan Type: TCP or Non-TCP scan types as well as inclusion of Services version and Operating system detection.
• Ping Options: ICMP, ACK, SYN, IPPronto, etc details (if needed).
• Scripting Options: If you need to add special scripts to your scan.
• Target Options: Exclude hosts as well as configure ports to scan.
• Source Options: Use decoys, set source address, set source port options if needed.
• Misc Options: Various options to include.

Once you have finished configuring your scan via the Wizard you can hit the Scan button. However, if you opted to go the Profile route you will need to select your new profile from the Profile dropdown list.

Scan results

Figure 2

After your scan has completed you can take a look at your scan results. There are five tabs that will give you various information about the scan. Obviously the Scan Details tab is where you will get a good summation of your scan. To get the low-level details of your scan take a look at the Nmap Output tab. As your scan is running this is the only tab you can view – and it will give you every piece of information you need.

Saving scans

A nice feature of Zenmap is the ability to save scans. Once you have a scan completed you can save your scan and open it for later viewing. The only downfall of this is the Nmap Output is a bit cramped together. While the scan is running the output is displayed in real time so it’s easy to read. When not in real time this output can really be a pain to get through. Fortunately, between the other tabs, you can get all of the information you need quickly and easily.

Final thoughts

Zenmap makes easy work out of the complicated Nmap command utility. If you have any need to map a network or analyze your network topography, Zenmap is the way to go.

Related posts

• Softperfect Network Scanner (3)
• Network Security Software Bothunter (1)
• Map your network with Lanmap (3)
• Asset scanning with nmap and ndiff (2)

The concept of the RiTi printer goes further than that. It does not require a power source for the actual printing process which is also something that traditional printers require. The printout is created by moving the ink case left and right manually. This obviously means that this method is not suited for printing out many papers at once.

Users who work regularly with printers might not be inclined to give that new printer concept a try as it opens a can of questions and possible problems:

• It is not practicable to print many documents
• The quality of the printout differs
• Only black and white printouts
• Coffee or tea dregs required to print

The RiTi printer could on the other hand prove to be the printer of choice for environmentally interested users who do occasional printouts.

source Greener Gadgets

Related posts

• ID Card Photo Printing (5)
• HP Smart Web Printing (5)
• Use your Printer and Scanner as a Copier (3)
• Stalled Printer Repair (7)
• Share Printer (2)

To combat this problem, I’ve decided its time for me to buy an external hard drive. I figure 500 GB is more than enough for me right now. What’s confusing me though is choosing which hard drive to buy. I’ve settled on a 2.5″ drive that draws power from the USB port so I won’t have to worry about an external power source. After a fair amount of research and considering my budget, I’ve narrowed my choice down to these two:

Seagate FreeAgent Go
Transcend StoreJet 25M

I’m getting a lot of conflicting reviews about both drives which is why I’m asking the Ghacks readers to help me make my decision. Here are some of my queries:

Multiple OS support: My primary computer runs Windows XP but I also own a laptop that’s running Ubuntu. I’d prefer something that works out of the box with both but I’m not averse to a little tweaking if necessary.

Partitioning: Would I need to partition my drive? I’m planning to segregate the data according to its format but can I just copy everything on it or should I create dedicated partitions? Should I leave some space free in case I want to install a portable version of an OS?

Durability: What’s the point in spending all that cash if my HD’s going to conk out after a while? Is build quality a factor and how long can I expect the drive to last?

What do you think of my choices? Have I missed anything out? What are you using for external storage and are you happy with it? Let me know in the comments.

Related posts

• Got My SSD, Any Questions Or Suggestions? (5)
• Your keyboard is more dirty than your toilet (1)
• Xbox 360 HD can be connected to your pc (3)
• Why QWERTY was invented ! (0)
• What you should do before bringing the PC in for repair (11)

The monitor itself was reporting that the ideal resolution was 1920×1080, so I figured it was just a matter of adding the correct mode to the “Screen” section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (see more about this in my article “Get to know Linux: Understanding the xorg.conf file“). It wasn’t that easy.

The first attempt

Normally, when I needed to change a resolution, or just hard-code a resolution, I would add a sub section in the xorg.conf file like:

SubSection "Display"
Modes "1920x1080" "1440x900" "1600x1200" "1440x1440" "1280x1024"      "1280x960" "1280x800" "1152x864" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"
EndSubSection

Normally this would work, picking up the 1920×1080 mode first. In this instance, however, this did not work. I will tell you that I am working with an NVidia Geforce 8800 chipset, so support in Linux is quite good. I know this isn’t an issue with the video card.  But no matter what resolution I used I was having no luck fighting the aspect ratio. The screen was either stretched too far horizontally, cropped at the bottom, or cropped all around.

I remembered there was an application that would gather information about my monitor and report it back. Maybe that was the key. The application is ddcprobe will give you the following information:

• Monitor name
• Monitor VertRefresh values and HorizSync rates range
• dpms

To install this application issue the command:

sudo apt-get install xresprobe

and you are ready to check. To do this issue the command

ddcprobe

which will return something like this:

vbe: VESA 3.0 detected.
oem: NVIDIA
vendor: Build    070809.2
product: MCP67 - mcp68-02 Chip Rev
memory: 65536kb
mode: 640x400x256
mode: 640x480x256
mode: 800x600x16
mode: 800x600x256
mode: 1024x768x16
mode: 1024x768x256
mode: 1280x1024x16
mode: 1280x1024x256
mode: 320x200x64k
mode: 320x200x16m
mode: 640x480x64k
mode: 640x480x16m
mode: 800x600x64k
mode: 800x600x16m
mode: 1024x768x64k
mode: 1024x768x16m
mode: 1280x1024x64k
mode: 1280x1024x16m
edid:
edidfail

Notice the edidfail at the end. What happens is sometimes hardware will not respond properly when the EDID is queried. If this happens try to probe a few more times, you should get more information. In my case, the Samsung 2333sw would never report the full information.

Back to square one.

NVidia

Remember I mentioned I was using an NVidia GeForce chipset? That’s a good thing because there is a handy application called nvidia-settings that I had used with much success before. The only reason I hadn’t automatically tried this was because I have had issues with the Elive Compiz distribution and X when trying to use tools not standard to the distribution. And besides the Elive resolution tool wasn’t picking up the new monitor so there was no hope there.

Installing the new tool was as simple as issuing:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings

Running the tool was equally as easy by issuing the command:

sudo nvidia-settings

Figure 1

When this application starts you will see a number of sections in the left pane (see Figure 1) that you can click on. Click on the X Server Display Configuration and you will then see a button for Detect Displays. Click on that and the new resolution should appear. The next step is to click the Save to X Configuration File which will write your changes.Finally click the Quit button to finish up.

In order to actually have the changes take effect you have to log out of X and log back in. Once you do you should see your new wide screen monitor in action.

What did it write?

The results of the nvidia-settings change to the xorg.conf file surprised me. It completely rewrote the “Screen” section of the Xorg configuration file. Here is the “Screen” section:

Section "Screen"
Identifier     "Screen0"
Device         "Videocard0"
Monitor        "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth    24
Option         "TwinView" "0"
Option         "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "CRT-0"
Option         "metamodes" "1920x1080 +0+0; 1440x900 +0+0; 1280x1024 +0+0; 1280x960 +0+0; 1280x800 +0+0; 1024x768 +0+0; 800x600 +0+0; 640x480 +0+0"
SubSection     "Display"
Depth       24
EndSubSection
EndSection

The TwinView option is usually used for dual head displays. In order for Xorg to get the 16:9 aspect ration it must use it and splice the two images together.

Final thoughts

Linux has come such a long way. But when you are attempting to configure a distribution that isn’t especially made to be Noobie-friendly don’t expect for tasks like attaching a widescreen monitor to be an out of the box experience. The good news is that there are plenty of tools to help you out of little situations such as this.

In the end the new monitor works and is as beautiful a display as I have seen.

Related posts

• Get To Know Linux: Understanding xorg.conf (7)
• Fedora 10 and the Evolution of Xorg (8)
• Display Information About Computer Monitors (0)