Quickest Way to Twinview with Ubuntu Heron

There are far too many poor ways to get X config to see two monitors. I know, because I've tried and forgotten them all. Linux has always been very bad at detecting video cards and changing desktop resolutions. Sure, I know all the reasons why, and I know how to manual edit my xorg.conf file. However, I should not have too. OSX and Windows have been making this easy enough for my elderly parents to do, why can't linux.

Well, I first must admin, Ubunut and other modern distros have come a long way on this front. I recently did an install of 8.04 and everything was pretty good out of the box. Next, I could choose the proprietary driver without problems either. All good. Except I have two monitors and I could not find a control panel anywhere to enable this. Hmm, guess linux is not quite there yet. Still, a quick search on the next brings up some help. Unfortunately nearly all of it is to edit the xorg.conf file by hand. I'm done with that. I used to do that. Now, if that is really where I have to go, then I'll pay M$ or Apple and not use Linux. Yes it's that important.

Anyway, I did find this great site: http://www.albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html

Here it helps you install one simple package called EnvyNG. Then, once installed you can install better proprietary drivers. Enable twinview and enjoy. All without text editing. Now why hasn't someone made this part of Ubuntu?

Finally an Easy way for Linux to Join AD

This has been the number one road block for using Linux at our School. About once a year I format a student system into Linux. It starts rosy, I'm feeling good about all the open source software we're going to use. It's an upbeat day. Flash forward to about a week later and I'm sadly RISing it back to XP. Why?

Students just can't login with their AD accounts like they do on Windows or Mac. They have to jump hoops, learn how to mount network shares, access network printers. Sure, the technologist out there might argue "but that stuff is all easy." It might be, but it's different enough to cause grumbling in the ranks.

To try to solve this I've wrestled with joining machines to the AD. I usually can do it, but it takes way ... way too long to do this on every machine. However, this has changed! I'm not really sure when this package came out, but I just found it today. It works like a charm. Here are the short steps for a denebian system

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install likewise-open
sudo domainjoin-cli join fqdn.of.your.domain Administrator
sudo update-rc.d likewise-open defaults
sudo /etc/init.d/likewise-open start

For a better explanation, and for more info, run over to this site where I found these instructions: Bobby Allen's Blog.

Now I just need to remember how to trigger a .sh login script from AD ...

Zoho is Great but needs RAM

I took my class down to the computer labs this week to learn about zoho. We only had a class and a bit, but they caught on very quickly. Using the Zoho notebook they quikly built review centers for the unit of study we are working in.

All went well, and I'd recommend this to anyone for a great online project. However, one note of warning. Zoho notebook sucks up RAM. After about half a class they started getting errors. I suspected hardware so bumped up the old machines from 512 to 1GB. That lasted a few more pages then the errors came back.

I had them switch to computers with 3 Gbs of RAM and no errors. So ... zoho is cool, but needs RAM be warned!

The power of Google Docs

OK, this is a lot like the wiki video but it still deserves a look. I can't tell you how many of my colleges think email is the ultimate collaboration tool. Even when faced with multiple versions of documents or being somehow left off the email group list, they still insist it's the best. Perhaps if they saw this great quick video (who is commoncraft anyway?)

Wikis in Plain English

Just in case you have not seen this video on Wikis, and so I'd have a place I could always find it, here is a simple video explaining why Wikis can be so good. Enjoy and think of the possibilities ...