Dual monitor in Ubuntu

I bought a new 32'' LCD TV. A Samsung LE32S62. The TV comes with a VGA connection, so obviously I had to connect my laptop to it!

The first challenge was making Ubuntu work with dual monitor. I did a few searches on the web and found a few instructions on how to do this. I ended up with a rather simple configuration. Just edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and add the following under the "Device" section. (NOTE: I'm using an nVidia graphics card. This may be different for your card)

Option "TwinView" "on"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"

Next restart X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace) and you should end up with dual monitor. This isn't exactly brilliant, because the TV ended up as the main monitor, and I would prefer to have the laptop as the main monitor. But after a bunch of failed tries I just gave up. After all, I don't think I'll use this setup a lot of times. (but I am thinking on recovering my old computer to use it as a media center!)

Here's a couple of pics of the setup:


Setting up xorg.conf with gvim


Watching a movie with VLC

Ubuntu, NVidia and Automatic updates

So you have your Ubuntu system up and running, you click the button to do an innocent software update and suddenly... Bye bye X! What happened?

Well, during my upgrade to Feisty I installed the NVidia drivers' packages and they were updated. And since for some reason Ubuntu's NVidia drivers still don't work, I lost my X! So, once again, it's back to w3m to download and install the NVidia drivers from NVidia's website...

This is easy to solve, but I would rather that it didn't happen again. So I removed the Ubuntu packages from my installation.

sudo apt-get remove nvidia-glx
sudo apt-get remove nvidia-kernel-common

After doing this you must reinstall the NVidia drivers, because removing these packages also deletes a bunch of required files. As a bonus, you win about 100Mb of free space. :-)

Google Earth on Ubuntu

Google Earth is a great software to explore your home planet and your neighborhood. But if you have an nVidia video card in Ubuntu you may experience some... rather strange results!

To solve this problem all you have to do is update to the latest nVidia drivers. But if you're lazy like me you're probably asking "Isn't there an easier way?".

Well, the answer is both yes and no. You do have to update the nVidia drivers, but Alberto Milone has a great script called Envy that does all the hard work for you.

Just follow the instructions on the website and in 5 minutes you should have Google Earth running without a scratch!