Tag Archives: ubuntu

Posted on
by

So, I recently got a notification that my Hardware Enablement Stack (HWE) was no longer going to be supported, so I had to perform an upgrade. I didn’t have time to move to 14.04, so I just did the HWE upgrade.

Unfortunately when I rebooted, I no longer had 3D support, and worse, my twin monitor setup was no longer supported (or rather, both monitors were active, but showed the same thing!).

Diagnosis

I am rocking a NVIDIA GeForce GT 610, which, although it’s a basic card, doesn’t seem to be supported very well by Ubuntu’s native Nvidia drivers. When I ran nvidia-detector, no cards were found.

Since my card was working before, I figured it was probably just a driver problem.

Solution

The solution I used for this was to update the Nvidia drivers to use the Nvidia proprietary drivers. Here’s how…

  1. First, visit the Nvidia website and use the wizard to download the correct driver bundle for your card.
  2. Hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 to enter a console
  3. Uninstall the existing Nvidia drivers: sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-*
  4. Move the old Xorg config out of the way: sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.orig1
  5. Stop X: sudo stop lightdm
  6. Run the NVidia installer (Note, you may need to reboot and re-run steps 5 & 6, as the installer may have to disable some kernel modules). Save yourself a headache, and be sure to build the DKMS module, so that changes aren’t lost when ubuntu updates itself.
  7. Reboot

All going well, you should now have working Nvidia drivers with two screen support!

Posted on
by

Canonical has come in for a little bit of heat for the inclusion of the Unity Shopping Lens into the latest release of Ubuntu.

This new tool, installed and switched on by default (although you can turn it off if you want), extends desktop searches online. The upshot being that when looking for a file or application on your desktop, it will also perform an Amazon search for products with similar names and keywords. You then have the option to buy these products (of course netting Canonical a cut from the referral).

Many find this an objectionable direction for a free software platform to take, although Canonical have to pay their developers somehow, and the service model has its limitations. A number of people in Europe have questioned its legality, given the stringent EU data protection laws.

However, I think Canonical may get bit by the law of unintended consequences just simplistically piping a search string through a third party engine.

Check out what happened when I looked for the Terminal application:

Ooops!

I think being offered Playboy DVDs from within the desktop may get people’s backs up, even if the choice to ad fund development of the operating system doesn’t!

Posted on
by

I have previously written about using Git to add revision history to existing rsync backups. Having performed a number of configuration changes and system upgrades recently, I have found another use of Git which has proven invaluable.

It’s a fairly obvious hack, but it turns out that turning selected configuration directories (for example /etc/apache2/ and /etc/exim4/) into in situ Git repositories is a very handy thing to do.

The revision log you get in a Git repo gives you a very handy place to note down the reasons behind a certain configuration change. This provides a very handy historical context for a change, meaning you’re less likely to remove something odd that turns out later on to have been important.

Having configuration under version control also means that even if you do accidentally remove or change something that later causes problems you can easily roll them back.

Another handy feature is the ability to easily branch, so you can very quickly experiment with some wild configuration settings and very quickly revert them to the original working configuration should they turn out to be problematic or if you run out of time to complete them.

So, give it a try!