Ubuntu

I recently purchased a matrox dualhead2go digital edition off of ebay on a whim. I did this because I wanted to make use of some extra monitors sitting around the office. I have also come to the realization that I have grown up as a developer and I have enough confidence to look anyone straight in the eye and say – “Yes, I need 3 monitors”. My current setup is a Dell XPS 1640 running Ubuntu 10.04, with a Radeon 3670 graphics card. Yeah, enter the wonderful world of linux graphics drivers. ...

I recently setup an Ubuntu based server that needed ruby to talk to oracle and mysql. If you are a rails developer, you should be familiar with mysql, but what about Oracle? It isn’t quite as straightforward as you might assume, but it is within the grasp of mere mortals. Please keep in mind that due to changing version numbers, all version numbers are replaced with *. It is up to the reader to properly translate the following commands. Don’t simply copy and paste. I am making the assumption that you are installing on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and you are using the 64-bit version. ...

It’s a horrible feeling to watch your system die after an upgrade. You may have experienced this problem before. Fear not, there is a workaround, and you will be back into your computer in no time. Just follow these directions, they may appear slightly more advanced than what you might be used to, but this can be fixed. Add “nomodeset” to the boot options in grub. Use vim (or nano, or whatever you like to use) to edit the boot options. If you are booting from your hard drive on a recent upgrade, you can hit “Esc” at the grub boot screen and select the kernel after 2.6.31. ...

My upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty went smoothly. I run off of a Dell Studio 15 with an external monitor at work. Unfortunately, this creates a virtual screen size greater than 2048×2048 which is an issue with the intel graphics driver, not compiz, so I unfortunately cannot enjoy the bling. However, when I am remote, compiz works great. Metacity is great, but after being spoiled by the eye candy it is hard to go back. This is coming from a guy whose favorite window manager was Enlightenment ...