Holy Crap, there's Miners!

After deciding to hit the jars after work on Friday we found ourselves at Arc Cafe where a overall-clad Uncle Mason was playing some experimental mining music. Click here for the ... err ... goodness! Mining.mp3. With a few beers in you and in a darkened room with your eyes shut you can imagine you're dying. It's fun.

More Linux Advocacy

More ideas for your community....

Sony forces Lik-Sang.com to close

Apparrently Lik-sang.com (a Hong Kong based e-store who ship a wide range of gaming paraphenalia for free) have been forced to close as a result of Sony bringing a lawsuit against them. Here's an automated response I received overnight from a sales enquiry:

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED EMAIL, YOUR REPLY WILL NOT BE SEEN.

Dear Sir or Madam,

Sadly, Lik-Sang.com had to close its virtual doors on October 24th of 2006 as a result of multiple legal actions brought against it by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. At the time of this writing, you can find information about this happening on http://www.lik-sang.com

As an unfortunate consequence, the email that you sent will not and cannot be read and/or addressed.

As of today, 24 October 2006, Lik-Sang.com will not be in the position to accept any new orders and will cancel and refund all existing orders that have already been placed. If you had an order pending, you will soon receive a separate e-mail about cancelations and refunds.

Lik-Sang.com wishes to thank all customers and supporters for everything. It's been a great decade. Thanks to people like yourself. We're going to miss catering to you. It was not up to us whether to continue or to get ousted though.

With warm regards,
All the best!

Lik-Sang.com

Other references: Slashdot post on Sony's initial action in early August

Linux Advocacy

Hmm ... how about that then? Ok, so it's a mockup but boy what a cool way to spread the word about Linux, especially now that lately (last few years) it works almost perfectly on any PC!

Ubuntu on the Desktop

One of the first things I tried when I got my new PC was to load Ubuntu up on it. The install went fine, but the video driver (ATI Radeon X800 GT, dual head DVI out) wasn't supported out of the box (or off the CD in this case). I downloaded the Ubuntu 6.10 beta the other day (I couldn't wait for it to come out properly) and installed that to find the same thing - it installed fine but I was left in text mode.

I did get things working nicely (dual screens, 85Hz refresh rates) by doing the following. This may work in Ubuntu 5.10 or 6.06, I don't know.

1. sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati
2. Edited the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and changed Driver "ati" to Driver "radeon"
3. Restarted GDM (/etc/init.d/gdm restart)

Much to my surprise, Gnome cranked up. I couldn't believe it was that easy. My next task was to get dual screens working. This took me about 30 mins to Google around and find the various answers to.

Now, it would appear that the main fear that strikes xorg.conf hackers is that their changes to config files will render their Xwindows system inoperable. I saw one post by some guy who said that after adding a directive to his xorg.conf file he had to reinstall Linux. I can only imagine that he didn't take a backup of the file and when he tried to undo his changes he undid them in the wrong place. The solution to this of course is to back up your xorg.conf file, i.e. cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak.

The first useful tip I came across was this tip from henriquemaia:

... instead of restarting gdm, one should first test if the configuration is right. As most newbies wouldn't know what to do if their X is lost, it's better to do

sudo xinit -- :2

where one can see the result on a new X (ctrl+alt+F9) without losing the first. If something goes wrong, one can easily use the backup configuration under their surviving X (ctrl+alt+F7).

Once you issue that command (from an xterm) you might get a blank hashed background. This is a test to show you that your xorg.conf settings are correct. Once happy that it looks ok, press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill that session.

I then found this article by Peter Van den Wildenbergh that discussed how to set up three screens on a SUSE linux box. Same applied for me, except I only had two screens. Read it carefully, and pay attention to the relationship between a screen, a monitor and a device. A screen is a virtual device which combines a monitor (a physical monitor with various capabilities) and a device (which is your graphics card which will probably be on some BusID like BusID "1:0:0".

To get the refresh rate of 85Hz I went to this Modeline Tool page where I selected my desired resolution and frequency and it responded with the correct Modeline to insert into my xorg.conf file in each of the Monitor sections.

Before you ask, I don't know if 3D gfx are supported with this setup, or anything else but what I do know is that I have a dual monitor layout with a good resolution and good refresh rate and a nice open source feel-good vibe :)

Here is my xorf.conf file with the above settings: xorg.conf