June 4

How to enable Compiz for dual screens on Ubuntu Jaunty
Posted on June 4th, 2009 at 6:58 AM by slm4996
Category: Reviews, howto

I have been trying to enable compiz for awhile now. See the problem is that I have a dual monitor setup and that makes my total screen resolution 2880×900. So what’s the problem you ask? Well it seems that due to many various reasons Compiz has been set to only allow a maximum width of 2048. So here is what I did and how I got it working:

Step 1 Figure out how to get Compiz to load without freaking out on me.

Terminal command:

SKIP_CHECKS=yes compiz --replace&

That was easy enough.  The problem was that my video card shared the pci id of a blacklisted card.

To make the change permanent add SKIP_CHECKS=yes to ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager

Another problem that many encounter has to do with xgl.  Intel chips are not correctly recognized and as such you have to launch compiz with the above command for them as well.

Step 2 Figure out why the desktop still stops at 2048 px from the left and how to fix it.

This is a little tougher, it seems  that compiz can handle larger resolutions as long as your video card can.

Thanks to a hard to find post, that I can no longer find, I found the answer it is a bug in the Mesa packages.

I will not post this solution here, only link to it as I deserve no credit for this at all.

https://edge.launchpad.net/~cavedon/+archive/ppa

Please visit the above link and enable his PPA as a trusted third party and then update your packages.

After this reboot your computer and everything should work!

May 20

How to setup a full graphic login via VNC on Ubuntu Jaunty
Posted on May 20th, 2009 at 1:53 PM by slm4996
Category: howto, x11

How to install x11vnc on Debian based systems. This will give you the ability to login remotely vis vnc without the need to leave the user logged in continuously.

Open a terminal

Enter the following commands in order:

sudo apt-get install x11vnc

Enter your password
Type “y” to install

Next:

sudo nano /etc/gdm/Init/Default

paste the next line of text into the end of the file before the “Exit” line if it exists

x11vnc -nopw -auth /var/lib/gdm/:0.Xauth -display :0 -noxfixes -bg -sb 11 -forever

Exit nano (ctrl+x) type “y” to save.

sudo nano /etc/gdm/gdm.conf-custom

Add the following lines, the [daemon] section might already exisit, if it does just add the middle line “KillInitClient=false”

[daemon]
KillInitClients=false
[security]

Exit nano (ctrl+x) type “y” to save.

Then reboot:

sudo reboot now