Peter’s Soapbox

No Comment?

I haven’t gotten any comments on the blog lately, other than the spam that Akismet’s been catching, but I have been getting comments via Facebook, Twitter, and email. Ted Roche was kind enough to point out that registration was turned off on my site. I’d totally forgotten that I shut off comments months ago because of all the spam, and never turned them back on after installing Akisment. So, comments are open once again.
Let’s hear it, people! What do you have to say?

Installing NX Free on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

Last week I read an article in this month’s Linux Magazine on remote desktop access via NX Free. While Ubuntu ships with a great client for Windows Terminal Services and VNC, NX free is more powerful in that it gives you full access to a Linux desktop environment, including such things as sounds. Unlike VNC, which requires extra effort to secure, NX Free runs over SSH, so encryption is built in. Continue reading Installing NX Free on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon…

People Do Not Listen

I have blogged in the past about how people do not know how to use voicemail, but I feel the need to revise this. “People are stupid.” A bit harsh. “People do not listen.” Yes, that’s better.

Okay, here’s the deal: last night, we got a voicemail to our customer service line at Paradigm. It was from a person who was checking on a job application… to be a flight attendant.
Okay, so maybe there’s some wiggle room here. After all, our voicemail greeting does not explicitly say “we are information technology consultants,” but then again, nobody would listen if it did. But if you’re given a choice of “current clients who need technical support,” and “you are not yet a client and have questions about our services,” do either of those remotely sound like a place where you’d send a job application to be a flight attendant?

How I Enabled My 1440×900 Widescreen 19″ Flat Panel under Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

As you may have heard on a November Fresh Ubuntu podcast, I was disappointed at Gutsy’s inability to reliably detect my widescreen 19″ flat panel display. It failed to give me the option to set the display to its native resolution of 1440×900 pixels. However, booting from the live CD correctly detected and set the resolution!

The fix?

1. Back up /etc/X11
   cd; tar cvfx X11.tgz /etc/X11
2. Boot from the live CD, and mount the Ubuntu partition (/dev/sda1 on my computer) into /media/sda1.
   sudo su; mkdir /media/sda1; mount /dev/sda1 /media/sda1
3. Set the screen to its proper resolution, if it’s not there already.
   Click System | Preferences | Screen Resolution | Choose the desired resolution | Click Apply.
4. Copy the working X11 config over to the inactive copy on the hard drive
   cp -fuvr /etc/X11/* /media/sda1/etc/X11/

Reboot from the hard drive and presto! We have 1440×900.

Now… if only I can get Windows to do the same thing. But that’s a separate blog post.

One Blog to Rule Them All?

I’ve been wrestling with the idea of breaking my blog up into separate blogs based on categories, instead of one monolithic mashup of tech, rants, and local politics. I can’t decide.