Kategori: Linux (Side 2 af 2)

I spend a lot of time designing websites, both a work and at home in my private time. I use the Firefox / Linux combo and try to stay as close to the W3C specifications as possible, but as we all know, that doesn’t necessarily mean a good end result in Internet Explorer. I still have access to Windows, but only as a dualboot option, so that would mean I would have to reboot my PC just to test a website, which isn’t a viable option in the long run.

Luckily, the nice guy Sérgio Lopes over at tatanka.com made a nice little script that makes installing Internet Explorer on linux a breeze. He calls it ies4linux and currently version 2.0 beta 6 is available. The scripts gives you the option to install 3 different versions of IE, and Macromedia Flash 8 is part of the package as well. Unfortunately, flash video flicker way too much to be usuable on my setup, but IE is working just fine. It glitched out on the first run though, but since then it’s been fine.

I found this hilarious avatar over at imperfect.deviantart.com. If you don’t get it, you need to catch up on your linux skills 🙂

Yes! I finally made it work – or at least constructed the right combination of search words for google to help me 🙂

At work I have a Dell Latitude D610 laptop, a docking station and a 20″ Dell flat panel. For the longest time I have tried to combine the two displays with both the x.org radeon driver and later on ATI’s proprietary fglrx driver.

The only success I’ve had with the x.org radeon driver is using the merged framebuffer together with a VGA cable, but that results in a not-so-nice image quality on the flat panel. I also had it working for two days with the DVI cable, but the next day the internal display in the laptop was dead, so I can’t recommend that option 😳

The proprietary fglrx driver that ships with Ubuntu Dapper (and most other linux distributions) is easy to configure, unfortunately it contains some bugs that triggered in my particular setup.
What I want is a resolution of 1400×1050 on the laptop and 1600×1200 on the flat panel. There’s a bug in the last few versions of the driver though, that makes it hard to do this, since it defaults the resolution of the second display to the resolution of the first display. This results in a resolution of 2800×1050 and garbage on the rest of the space on the second display.

Luckily, this page has a work-around for the problem. The solution is quite genius and uses one of the fglrx driver’s shortcomings to our advantage. When the driver is in big desktop mode it doesn’t support the Virtual parameter in the Display configuration – at least as you would expect. By specifiying a virtual size the driver will magically use the complete 1600×1200 resolution on the second display and I get what I want – full utilization of my displays.

The only problem with this solution is when the laptop is not docked and only have the internal display available. The driver is in single-head mode and accepts the Virtual configuration, creating a scrollable view port. This is easily fixed with the following command, though.

$ sudo xrandr -s 0

Have a peek at my xorg.conf for configuration details.

I’ve been using the Horde Framework for a long time, mostly for the IMP webmail application. It has always been a great experience, albeit a little slow with POP3. So around the new year I scrapped my Windows setup and replaced it with a postfix + courier-imap combination. This is a really nice setup and rather easy to configure decent antivirus, antispam and blacklisting.

The problem with Horde is trying to keep up with the frequest security releases and trying to patch it is tedius and not fun. Usually I’ve upgraded the database and replace all of the php files. But this is really no good, since I have to redo the configuration each time.
This time around I decided to do it differently and give the Horde packages in Debian a go. Installation was as always a breeze, but configuration was a little harder than ususal, since Debian moves files around to make them match the FHS. But as always – there is nothing a little hacking can’t fix and Horde is running again in all its glory.

Now I’ll just keep my fingers crossed and hope future upgrades will be piece of cake 🙂