Configuring Dual Monitor on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon

For the past few days i was trying to configure the external Monitor on my laptop. I am using a Dell Latitude D610 laptop with ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Mobility Radeon X300] graphics card. My external Monitor is Dell 1905FP.

The utility displayconfig-gtk which can be accessed by Sytem->Administration->Screens and Graphics is not working in Ubuntu 7.10. And configuring Dual Monitor on Ubuntu was a painful task for me. Initially i tried with Xinerama for configuring but it didnt help me.

These some of the steps i did to make my dual monitor work :

1. $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

This creates a new xorg.conf file and avoids unnecessary extra lines.

2. Add a Virtual section under the Display subsection of xorg.conf file. So my Screen section looks like this :

Section "Screen"
       Identifier      "Default Screen"
       Device          "ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Mobility Radeon X300]"
       Monitor         "Generic Monitor"
       DefaultDepth    24
       SubSection "Display"
               Modes           "1024x768"
               Virtual         2304    1024
       EndSubSection
EndSection

3. Run the xrandr command to find out the configuration of your Laptop LCD screen and the External monitor.
$ xrandr -q
My Laptop LCD screen is shown as LVDS and the external Monitor is shown as DVI-0. These are the names should be used for configuring.

4. Now run the xrandr command :

$ xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output DVI-0 --auto --left-of LVDS

This makes External Monitor to be my left of the LCD screen. You can also use --right-of , --above , --below to configure according to your need.

In case you get an error like this:

 xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 1280x1024 (desired size 2304x1024)

Then change the Virtual section in xorg.conf file to 2304x1024 and restart the X server.

If you need the complete documentation about using xrandr to configure Dual Monitor refer to :
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2

Ubuntu Rocks

Recently shifted to Ubuntu 7.10 on my office laptop from windows. And the performance is really good. I successfully configured Evolution to work with Microsoft Exchange server and the LDAP server. I was very much happy to see my name on the credits section of Evolution, which i worked on a long time back. Sometimes i see that evolution crashes and need to be started again after manually killing the process.
Im basically a Fedora user for long time and the configurations are little different in Ubuntu. But the apt-get command is very much useful. I need not search for all the rpm files and the dependencies.
Configuring pidgin in office was another big trouble, as the gtalk and yahoo messengers traffic were routed through a different server.
Im still having lots of problems in configuring dual monitors on Ubuntu.

The Spam game

How many times have you come across this in your mail as forwards ??

There are 3.22 millions of Indians in USA (15% of population) . YET,
38% of doctors in USA are Indians.
12% scientists in USA are Indians.
36% of NASA scientists are Indians.
34% of Microsoft employees are Indians.
28% of IBM employees are Indians.
17% of INTEL scientists are Indians.
13% of XEROX employees are! Indians.

This is a spam mail which is floating in the internet for quite a long time. There are no solid evidence for these data which is getting passed on. And now the spam as even convinced our Indian Government about the data which is presented.

Our ministry of state for HRD, presented the same data in Rajya Sabha in defense of the Indians and our achievement.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/36_of_scientists_at_NASA_are_Indians_Govt_survey/articleshow/2853178.cms
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/India_rising_in_US_Govt_falls_victim_to_net_hoax/articleshow/2856295.cms

It is the responsibility of the government to validate any information which is being published. How careless are they ?? And these poor politicians are to be blamed for all these.