Ubuntu 7.10
Saturday, January 19th, 2008Well,
Although i seem to be in a minority when it comes to the specifics of my setup it is somthing which does continue to annoy me about the whole *nix situation in general.
Don’t get me wrong, i use Unix and Linux on plenty of servers, but as a desktop it has always been found lacking, i have taken it once again and given it another go.
So far its been pretty good, there are a few issues, but ones i think which will eventually be solvable. Installing hardware is pretty easy – my printer and so on were instantly recognised.
The new effects system – compiz fusion, is however a bugbear as is X with its multi-monitor issues – i have a triple monitor setup, two graphics cards, three screens and this simple does not work properly with X.
At the moment i have my two Dell 17″ TFTs on the nVidia 6600GT AGP i was given and this works perfectly – using nVIdias config and restricted driver i can turn on twin view and get all the nice display effects. However, i want to use my 3rd monitor on a seperate PCI ATI Radeon 9200 card, which is tricky to say the least – having it as one extended display like in windows does not seem to be at all possible, having it as a seperate X display which i cant drag windows on or off does work but only if i disable compiz, and compiz is too pretty to be disabled.
I have asked on the compiz forums for a solution so we’ll have to wait and see, X really is backwards when it comes to multi monitor support from multi cards, theres no reason for it – it works perfectly well under windows. Although with the newer nVidia drivers there is no chance of having additional non-nVidia cards.
I was also given another 1Gb of DDR400 which i have fitted half into my desktop and half into the mediacentre which is a nice little upgrade. Last week i also installed mediacentre onto my laptop, along with the Omega Drivers it works very nicely and i now have a nice interface to use when in my bedroom, instead of having to get up to read the screen.
I’ve also got to grips with solaris/zfs/raidz using the pretty ZFS web gui and i think while its not going to do exactly what i want, its pretty close and as good as im going to get, i just need to pick up all the bits to build the box. My plan is to upgrade the mediacentre so it will play HD content – Core2Duo 2Ghz, 1gb RAM, new mobo + ATI X1600 should work nicely, then use the old bits in the new fileserver in a new case and new disks.
What else have i played with? I don’t remember off hand, i have found and signed for a house in salford which myself, martin, matt and sam will be moving into in July ready for returning to uni. That should be a lot of fun, the location is perfect too, i even have a seperate attic room which i can escape to.
There we go, thats the update, Ubuntu 7.10 is pretty cool, i even have CounterStrike running nicely – under WINE no less! It’s certainly come on a LONG way since the last time i tried it.
