Dual monitor in Ubuntu 8.04 for Intel Graphics

It really couldn’t be simpler to plug in a second monitor to your laptop and increase your screen real estate in Ubuntu 8.04. The instructions that follow is for integrated graphic card (in my case, it’s Intel 810 graphics driver for laptop). First, use xrandr in terminal to see how many displays are connected/detected by Ubuntu (usually LVDS refers to your laptop screen, and VGA is your external monitor). Once all your displays are connected, enable dual monitor support by doing:

xrandr --output LVDS --mode 1024x768 --pos 0x0 --output VGA --mode 1280x1024 --pos 1024x0

The arguments mode and pos after output LVDS (or VGA) define the screen resolution and which part is displayed in that screen, respectively. For instance, when you used the above command, the graphics controller created a virtual screen that is 2560×1024 large. The block of 1024×768 starting from the top-left corner (0x0) will be displayed in LVDS, while the block of 1280×1024, starting from 1024×0 will be displayed in VGA. There is a missing block of 1024x(1024-768) starting from 0x768 that is not displayed at all, but I can live with that.

The first time you use the above command, you might get an error complaining “xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 1024×800 (desired size 2560×1024)”. In that case, you need to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf (remember to create a backup). Insert these lines in between Section "Screen" and its corresponding EndSection

SubSection "Display"
Virtual 2560 1024
EndSubSection

The two numbers assign the (maximum) size of your virtual screen.

Getting more out of Ubuntu box

So, Ubuntu works out-of-box for you? Great! But, the fact that you dumped Windoze and come into GNU/Linux world surely tells that you always want something more. Due to licensing issues, a lot of useful softwares are not bundled together with Ubuntu, but are available in the `multiverse’ repository. As a personal user, most of the license terms do not concern you, so go ahead and enable `multiverse’. If you do not know how to do it, go to Community Doc for a graphical guide. After that, you are open to various tools that Ubuntu has to offer:

1. If you dual-boot, you sometimes want to access Windows NTFS partitions from Ubuntu. Certainly you want to avoid rebooting into Windows then rebooting into Ubuntu again. In fact, it is very easy, do:
   sudo apt-get install ntfs-config
   Reboot if you need to. Go to `Computer’ and you’ll see Windows partitions are listed there. Isn’t it amusing how simple this can be? (note that FAT32 partitions can readily be accessed without this step).
2. I’ve covered how to install Adobe Reader and Flash viewer previously.
3. To customize the looks of Ubuntu, you can install themes into $HOME/.themes, and icon packs into $HOME/.icons. Or you can go to Preferences->Appearances to install themes and icon packs. gnome-look.org offers you plenty of choices.

ROOT installations on Ubuntu 8.04 and Leopard

ROOT is an Object-Oriented Data Analysis Framework created by CERN to perform all kinds of scientific data manipulations. I’ll skip the intro and proceed to the ROOT installation on Ubuntu Hardy Heron (as well as Feisty Fawn) and on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2. You can find plenty of information at the ROOT website.

ROOT 5.18 setup on Ubuntu Hardy Heron:

1. Get the source tarball (root_v5.18.00.source.tar.gz). I put it in the home directory (~) and cd to it.
2. tar -xzf root_v5.18.00.source.tar.gz
3. cd root # root is the directory you extracted from the tarball
4. sudo apt-get install libX11-dev libXpm-dev libxft-dev build-essential libxext-dev # needed to build ROOT
5. ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/root --libdir=/usr/local/root/lib --enable-minuit2 --enable-roofit
6. make # if dual core processor, use make -j2
7. make install
8. The installation is done! Each time you want to run ROOT, you have to point to the right paths. This can be done by doing source /usr/local/root/bin/thisroot.sh (in a bash shell). You can also put the command in .bashrc to have it executed each time you open a terminal.

Get Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04 LTS) up and running on HP DV 2000 in no time

The following are the step-by-step procedures I used to setup Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS (released Apr 24, 2008) on my HP DV 2000 laptop (or DV 2015nr specifically). Most instructions applied directly to this model, but I’d say other models/brands will not deviate too much from these rather standard procedures I used.

Ok. First, grab yourself a copy of the installation disk image (.iso), which is roughly 700MB (can nicely fit into a CD). I recommend using torrent, although you can download from the server (warning: it’s very slow!). Once the .iso is downloaded, burn it into a blank CD-R. Nero can do it, although I prefer an open-source program called InfraRecorder.

Then you need to prepare partitions for dual-boot (I’m assuming you have already installed Windows, and you want to dual-boot). In order to have Ubuntu live side-by-side with Windows, you need an ext3-formatted primary partition and also a swap space (if it’s not primary, the partition won’t boot). The Ubuntu partition needs less than 2 or 3 GB, but there’s no harm in giving it more space; while the swap space should be as large as your memory (so if you have 512MB RAM, then make it 512 MB large). I would not want to go into details of partitioning, you can refer to a documentation here. As for myself, I used the very nice Paragon partition manager, but bear in mind it is a proprietary software.