Category Archives: Administrative

Administrative, Technology and Society

XFCE

10 Comments

Is there a doctor in the house? I decided to just go to Fedora 19 beta, since it’s going to be released in a few days anyway. It’s fine so far, except I’m running XFCE, and it refuses to give me a monitor size any larger than 1280×1040, so I’m losing about an inch on all sides with my 21″ LG.

I’ve changed the configuration in the settings editor to 1600×900, and the same in the display.xml file. But when I log out and back in again, it resets them to 1280×1040. I can’t find where in the system it’s getting this information, despite lots of grepping (is it misreading the signal from the monitor?), but it’s driving me nuts. And there doesn’t seem to be a configuration file for X any more.

Any ideas?

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, it’s probably getting it from xrandr:

[simberg@linux-station ~]$ xrandr
xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default
Screen 0: minimum 640 x 480, current 1280 x 1024, maximum 1280 x 1024
default connected 1280×1024+0+0 0mm x 0mm
1280×1024 0.0*
1280×720 0.0
1024×768 0.0
800×600 0.0
640×480 0.0

So how do I force a change?

[Late evening update]

Yes, the problem is likely some driver or new version of X or something inf F19 foxtrotting things up, because Fedora 18 recognized my monitor no problem. Just not sure what to do about it.

[Sunday morning update]

OK, I installed the latest Nvidia drivers from RPMFusion, and all is now well. It’s a beautiful screen, in fact.

Administrative, Technology and Society

My Computer Problems Are Mounting

13 Comments

Literally.

I just bought a new drive to upgrade from Fedora 14 to 18. So I load the new OS onto the new drive, which is drive 1, and keep my old installation as drive 2, figuring I can then just move the old data off it onto the new one. The problem is, it won’t let me. I can see the drive in the Gnome file browser, but my home directory has an “X” on it, and when I click on it, it tells me I don’t have permission to view it. I tried mounting it as root in the shell, and I’m not seeing anything on it that way. I know it’s all fine, because I can still boot from it and go back to the old system, but I can’t figure out how to access it from the new one.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Administrative, Health, Technology and Society

Busy And Aching

8 Comments

I was traveling most of last week, and I’m now frantically trying to finish the book. Plus, I had a tooth extracted this morning.

Just in case anyone was wondering why blogging has been light to non-existent.

[Wednesday morning update]

Thanks for the sympathy, but it’s really not that bad. The extraction was almost painless, with lidocaine, and I’ve only experienced a little swelling, and not much pain, on ibuprofen. I feel pretty much back to normal today. Next related project is an implant, in a few months after the bone graft has filled in and healed, but my experience with those is that they’re not a big deal, either. Modern dentistry is one of the many reasons that I wouldn’t want to have been born in an earlier era.

Administrative, Popular Culture, Space, Space History

The Future That Never Was

15 Comments

Ed Driscoll has what looks like an interesting post on the space colonization movement, but unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to link to it. The URL looks fine, but it redirects back to http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/. Is it just me? Can anyone else see it?

[Update a while later]

OK, just got a new URL from Ed, that works. I haven’t actually read the whole thing yet, because I couldn’t see the second page, but I may have more commentary after I do.