Do you have trouble switching the display when docking and undocking your Linux laptop? In this article I will show you how to use disper and keyboard shortcuts to do that reliably if you are using nVidia's annoyingly broken RandR-incompatible graphics driver.
Recently I received an unexpected email from Packt Publishing. They were looking for book reviewers. At first I hesitated because my pile of todos tells me I really shouldn't add more to it. But looking at their online catalog I learned that they offer many open-source related books. And taking a second look at my book shelf I even realized that I already own two Packt books.
I've been back from KDE (4.2!) to Gnome and with the mighty powers of Compiz my desktop is the envy of my Windows coworkers and still geeky functional. Well, somehow functional. For a while I wondered why I can't properly use VNC to remote-control my desktop from home. The connection works and I see the desktop but nothing seems to happen when I click or type. Now I figured out the desktop in the VNC client window is just not refreshed while my mouse and keyboard actions really do what they were supposed to on the VNC server.
After years of being a dedicated KDE user it seems like it's finally time for me to go "back" to Gnome. I once tried KDE 4.x from the Debian 'experimental' branch knowing that it's probably unstable and will require a lot of patience. But I was willing to report bugs and dive into new things. It didn't take long though to find out that graphics were extraordinarily slow with the new "desktop effects". The worst was resizing a 'konsole' (KDE terminal window). It took 25 seconds until the window was resized and redrawn!
I've changed jobs recently and at my new employer we have laptops as workstations instead of the classic tower cases under the desks. After years of working on a crappy Fujitsu-Siemens laptop I got a Lenovo T500 and was very excited about finally getting a decent laptop. I could even decide on its configuration and thought a combination of the built-in ("integrated") Intel graphics card and a powerful ATI ("discrete") graphics card should rock. I was pretty sure it should decently work with Debian on it but reality caught up with me very quickly.
While many other "web designers" create hacky websites (that break in many funny way once the browser developers figure out how to do their jobs right making the hacks fail) I almost always try to use W3C's web standards. Just that sometimes I forget to validate my own pages for proper CSS or (X)HTML. Thanks to the great "Web Developer" Firefox plugin I can press Ctrl+Shift+A and validate my local (X)HTML using their validation service. But I felt that a more automatic way would be nice.
And once again I was bitten by problems on my Debian laptop mounting directories from the file server via NFS. After a Debian dist-upgrade I couldn't login to KDE any more. Shell login worked somehow but I quickly found out I could neither read nor write any files there. Apparently an "ls -al" showed me the right permissions (not just unmappable numeric UIDs or something of that kind) and an "id -a" confirmed that my LDAP PAM configuration still worked. But reading or writing any file just lead to "Permission denied".
Bear with me that I keep you posted with boring news of screenshots.debian.net. But after further optimisation (caching the start page, serving screenshots directly from nginx instead of via Pylons) we decided that it's time to get us on Slashdot. Thanks a lot to zepolen for teaching me about memcached and threading!
I'm still amazed how quickly the word is spreading. Yet another proof that good products need little marketing. ;) Bear with me that I share a few articles I found on the net just a few days after going live:
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