ben robison

Feisty Fawn, Radeon x1300, and 1920×1200 Resolution

For all the weary googlers out there, this one is for you. I’ve recently installed Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn on my Dell Optiplex 745 Desktop which has a Dell 2407WFP Widescreen monitor plugged into it.

During the LiveCD installation and afterwards, the best resolution I could get on the screen was 1600×1200@60 which isn’t bad, but looks slightly wider than it should given that in Windows XP & Vista (setup on different partitions) it displays at 1920×1200@60.  I used the Restricted Drivers Manager to install fglrx for the Radeon, but that didn’t help.

All my google searches related to the video card and the monitor inevitably led me to instructions dealing with installing the fglrx driver and running Beryl etc. Nothing told me how to get my screen resolution bigger. Basic edits to the Xorg file led me to several changes that didn’t work (and some that completely broke X, let that be a lesson to always backup before making changes…lucky for me I did).

I finally stumbled upon a bug that had been logged with a link to this article at WiredFool. I followed the tips he had including cutting out a lot of the fluff in the Xorg file and used the Modeline calculator that the article linked to. I tried a few different runs through before I found one that displayed the way I wanted it.

I skipped everything in the “Monitor Configuration” section. Filled in my Visible Resolution and Refresh Rate in the “Basic Configuration” section, and also checked the 16:9 Constrain Aspect Ratio box. I left everything else the same and hit the calculate button at the bottom. The Modeline is displayed at the top of the screen.

Your mileage may vary, but if perhaps you’re hardware is exactly the same as mine, here are the relevant portions of my xorg.conf file (although not formatted very well…you can add the tabs back in if you want).

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “DELL 2407WFP”
Option “DPMS”
Modeline “1920×1080@60″ 182.28 1920 1952 2640 2672 1080 1102 1113 1135
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Device “Generic Video Card”
Monitor “DELL 2407WFP”
Defaultdepth 24
SubSection “Display”
Depth 1
Modes “1920×1200″
EndSubSection
SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
Modes “1920×1200″
EndSubSection
EndSection

Good luck in all your Feisty adventures.

New Options for Web Analytics

Just a quick post on a topic that I found quite interesting.  Apparently Microsoft is working on software that will uniquely identify users based on their browsing habits.  It’ll watch what websites you visit, how long you stay, etc., but could also potentially start sifting through your history to see where you’ve already been.

According to the article,  right now it can guess age and gender fairly well, but there are very high hopes for it’s future potential.  Online privacy advocates get your guns ready.

Recent Life Events

For those who read my blog, you’ve noticed I haven’t written for awhile.  Now that things are starting to settle down a bit following graduation and beginning a new job, I thought I’d venture back into the world of blogging.

Now that I no longer have homework to do, my spare time has dramatically increased.  I spend more time at work than I ever spent at school, but the time is well spent and when I’m done working, I’m done for the day.  What will I do with all my leisure time?

There are a few plans, but at the top of the list will be the creation of a new domain.  I’m going to move all my web analytics related content to a new domain (still to be decided upon).  Since all my rails work is centered around web development, that will go along with the web analytics stuff to make a new Rails/Web Development/Web Analytics/SEO Dabbling blog.

This blog won’t be going anywhere, but it’s going to become more about me, my life, and my computer dabbling hobbies, wading into various *Nix distros and griping about software I don’t like.  So once I get the new site up and running, I’ll let you all know where my intelligent sounding posts are going, and this one will be for my rants and hobbies.

I’m working at Omniture now, just got all my benefits papers filled out and submitted and looking forward to the completion of training so I can actually get to work.  This is going to be fun.