Aquarionics

How to get Dual Head working on Dell’s Latitude c610

With one monitor plugged into the monitor port and the LCD display, you too can have a dual-head setup. It’s great. You do it like this:

In XF86Config:

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"radeon_one"
	Driver		"radeon"
	BusID	"PCI:1:0:0"
	Screen		1
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"radeon_zero"
	Driver		"radeon"
	Screen		0
	BusID	"PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"LCD"
	HorizSync	30-57
	VertRefresh	43-72
	Option		"DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"CRT"
	HorizSync	30-57
	VertRefresh	43-72
	Option		"DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"LCD Screen"
	Device		"radeon_zero"
	Monitor		"LCD"
	DefaultDepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		24
		Modes		"1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Monitor Screen"
	Device		"radeon_one"
	Monitor		"CRT"
	DefaultDepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
		Depth		24
		Modes		"1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier	"Default Layout"
	Screen		"LCD Screen" rightOf "Monitor Screen"
	Screen		"Monitor Screen"
	InputDevice	"Generic Keyboard"
	InputDevice	"Configured Mouse"
	Option		"Xinerama"
EndSection

Back from tEC. Drank lots, slept little, played games, talked. Fun.

Also pulled muscles in both arms by trooping around Durham (which has excessive amounts of hills) with a rucksack that was far too heavy. lifting things painful. Expect lack of typing for next day or so.

Ow.

Things that have happened in the last five days since ‘Threadnaught’:

• I’ve learnt that the secret to chocolate sauce is to shake the bottle with the lid closed.
• Brown shows up on white curtains, seven feet from the table where there was ice cream and a limited amount of chocolate sauce.
  • And the carpet.
• Also the television, speakers, post and furniture.
• Do not follow Aquarius blindly when he says “Kernel-image-2.6.4-k7” as your laptop is not a K7 and this won’t work.
• 686 works better
• XF86 doesn’t like your laptop much.
• Project Utopia is Neat.
• Debian Rocks.
• It’s a good idea to pay your rent
• You should remember that you’re getting paid by cheque, and these take four working days to clear.
• My bank has just decided that cheques now take six working days to clear. The age of communication is upon us, and Halifax is going backwards. May it fuck off and die, and take my overdraft with it.
• Buying a Young Persons Railcard is cheaper than the discount it gives you for a ticket to Durham.
  • …yet despite already having a Railway Photo Card (for my Letchworth/London railcard) I need another photo card for the YP Railcard.
  • I still don’t deal with photo booths well.
  • Using the advice a model gave me on how to not look like a serial killer in passport photos makes me look like a male model.
  • Who is also a serial killer.
  • Train compains remain morons.
• RedDragDiva’s Mushroom Thing is really nice.
• It’s vitally important to take your keys when leaving the office
  • Especially when the following day you can’t get out of the house because your girlfriend deadlocked the door (your keys for which are in London) and the back garden backs onto three other back gardens.
  • The spare keys are in LC’s room, on the dresser.

• You moron.

  I’m off to Durham for the weekend. TTFN

So, I’ve been considering finishing up and releasing Project Threadnaught.

Threadnaught is a category aggregation system for weblogs, using existing technology to bring weblogs together. Okay, so far, so space age. How does it do it?

I set up a taxonomy of possible categories, probably based on the Library of Congress or DMOZ or something (I was working on basing on the Dewey Decimal System, but having spent a couple of months in corespondance with the company who own the name I don’t really want to risk having any more to do with them. I can, apparently, use the DDC, providing I never use that name. Arseoles to the lot of them).

When someone makes a weblog post about that subject (Say, Cat Pictures) they send a trackback or pingback to http://altru.istic.net/threadnaught/ping/pictures/personal/pet/cats/ky00t and J. Random Blogger, who subscribed to the RSS feed at ttp://altru.istic.net/threadnaught/rss/pictures/personal/pet/cats/ky00t, and who only cares about the really, really ky00t cat pictures sees that it’s happened.

That’s the basic idea. This came about with etcon a while back, where someone set up a place to trackback, and anyone talking about etcon would trackback that, and people who cared could follow it.

And I’ve spent large parts of today (When I’m not installing Linux on the new laptop) considering this again, as I have been for the past few years or so. And I finally decide to write all these ideas up as a weblog posting before I start coding on this…

…and find that Internet Topic Exchange has been doing this exact idea for the last two years.

I need to act faster on these ideas.

When I left for work this morning, my office desktop was screwed. I’d wiped the Linux partition (I never used it at work anyway) to make way for more MP3s the previous day, and forgotten that was the drive grub needed to access to boot. Desktop screwed. Since I’d forgotten the admin password for XP, I couldn’t fix it.

This morning I came in early, brought Knoppix with me, and lifted all the user data off with that (About 2mb, all told. I run Teflon Windows installs, nothing sticks to the main box for long, it’s all stored on the server, so I can wipe it clean again), reboot, reinstall WindowsXP, drink tea (And repair the W2k box. This is a 1998 era box running W2k on a 2gig drive – not big enough, so someone’s compressed the drive. Since the swap space is now compressed, it took me two hours (click, boil kettle, click, pour water, click, type, ok, take out teabag, click…) to get it back (and put the swap on the TOTALLY UNUSED 10GIG PARTITION instead) and turn off all the prettiness enhancers. Today’s job was to reinstall W2k so our mac-bound Designer has something that runs Win/IE – the main platform we’re developing for – and can test on.)

So, WinXP, turn off prettiness, install Firefox, Thunderbird, XChat, Gaim, Plugins for each. Then O (Who is the accountant, along with other things) came in and said I was to get the new laptop. This new laptop was gained when a friend of a friend would rather buy a new laptop than fix the old one (and this is a nice laptop). So I’ve now got a nice new laptop to play with, and can IRC from the living room.

I find it amusing that whilst the laptop doesn’t have Wireless networking, my heavyweight desktop does, so I can use the wire that used to go to that for the Laptop.

Currently, I’m seeing how long the battery lasts, with MP3s playing, networking working, and everything going. I’ll be watching DVDs in a bit. So far, it looks like about 5/6 hours. I spent the train journey home using it as a thousand dollar MP3 player to catch up on four missed episodes of LUGRardio.

Note to future self, berate Aq about ntop and Advanced Unix Development next time you see him.