ken’s blog

Tonight there was snow at South Point! Well, not the real stuff… but a nice sprinkling in a controlled area, none on the roads, you know what that does to NC roads.

Tonight was the annual Tree lighting to kick off the holiday season. I do have to say that I think it is a bit to early. But despite that, we had a blast. Ashlyn and Drew both had a good time, but Ashlyn was really glowing with excitement. She enjoyed the music, the dancing, the lighting of the tree, the snow flurries, and most of all Santa!

So I guess it is Christmas time…

Was just reading a bit about plans for Xorg 7.3. The short version is no xorg.conf, completely dynamic. And possibly even hotplug for monitors.

This would be a great thing for Linux on the desktop. Good configuration tools are lacking and I have been desperately searching from something to replace system-config-display. It works ok, my biggest complaint is the dependency on things like rhpl and rhxpl. I guess I can live with that until Xorg 7.3.

Just packaged up the a snapshot of the current cvs HEAD of tomboy which includes the cool new note pinning feature. It seems plenty stable, and imho a very useful feature.

I practically run my life through tomboy, and this has been something I have been wishing for. The idea being notes that you want to always show up in your list you push the little pin in… and it stays! Check it out, Foresight users just run “sudo conary update tomboy”.

Laurie has a Dell Inspiron 6000 that has had an early Foresight release candidate on it for a good year now. She finally said she wanted all the latest cool stuff and wanted a reinstall. I grabbed the latest isos and did a fresh install.

This laptop has a intel i915 video card, which didn’t work very well with Xorg 6.8.2 and in the past I had to use the vesa driver. Now, with Xorg 7.1 the intel driver just works. After install, I didn’t have to configure anything to get beryl to work. I installed beryl and beryl-core from foresight.rpath.org@fl:1-devel and ran beryl-manager. It just worked… so cool! I am really looking forward to shipping the distro with beryl included…

Seems the latest open source ati driver works with AIGLX and beryl. It is quite impressive, and I am glad to see the performance is at least on par with if not better than Xgl/Compiz. Foresight comes with AIGLX by default, so it is quite simple to get beryl running with the radeon driver. First step is to get your xorg.conf configured with the radeon card, here is mine for reference.

#/etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "single head configuration"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
        Option         "AIGLX" "True"
EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "Module"
        Load  "bitmap"
        Load  "dbe"
        Load  "ddc"
        Load  "dri"
        Load  "extmod"
        Load  "freetype"
        Load  "glx"
        Load  "int10"
        Load  "type1"
        Load  "vbe"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

        Option      "XkbModel" "pc105"
        Option      "XkbLayout" "us"
        Identifier  "Keyboard0"
        Driver      "kbd"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "Monitor0"
        ModelName    "LCD Panel 1400x1050"
        HorizSync    31.5 - 90.0
        VertRefresh  59.0 - 75.0
        Option      "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        BoardName   "ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]"
        Driver "radeon"
        Option "DRI" "True"
        Option "ColorTiling" "on"
        Option "EnablePageFlip" "True"
        Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
        Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "True"
        Option "RenderAccel" "True"
        #Option "GARTSize" "64"
        #Option "AGPMode" "4"# 

Now restart X.



sudo service xdm restart

Verify that X seem to be working.  Next step is to install beryl and run it.



sudo conary update beryl{,-core}=@fl:1-devel
beryl-manager


That is it… you should have have some bling to show off to your friends   If all is working and you would like to add it to your default session by launching “System->Preferences->Sessions” in the menu.  Select the “Startup Programs” tab and hit the “add” button and type in the beryl-manager command.  That is it!

rBuilder Online now supports generating Xen images! There are a bunch of appliances available already as Xen images, check them out. Included are 3 of my projects, MySQL Appliance, PostgreSQL Appliance, and the LAMP Appliance.

To use any of these appliances in your own Xen dom0, here’s a guide.

Had a good night of trick or treating… the kids had a blast. Drew was a Carolina Hurricane’s hockey player (I loved the shoulder pads) and Ashlyn was a Princess. She has been talking about being a princess all year.