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Ubuntu: The Switch (4 of 6) - Configuration

Previous Entries:

Ubuntu: The Switch (1 of ?)
Ubuntu: The Switch (2 of ?) - First Steps
Ubuntu: The Switch (3 of ?) - Installation

Not that Ubuntu is freshly installed on my PC, before I start getting it ready for business, it’s time to do some configuring. In particular I need the get the monitor configured correctly and then do what comes natural… poke around with the system settings of course!

Monitor

I have a two monitor setup with a Radeon X700 Pro 256MB. Out of the box my monitors are simply duplicating each other and the resolution will not go over 1024×768 and the optimum resolution for the monitors is 1280 x 1024. I found the tutorial I needed here, but then I tried this:

1. System->Administration->Restricted Drivers Manager
2. I went through the simple wizard and did a computer restart
3. After rebooting I opened up the terminal and typed “sudo aticonfig –desktop-setup=horizontal” to make the screen spread across two monitors.
4. Then I rebooted again.
5. Joy! I now have the second monitor extending the first.
6. Now I tried enabling video accelleration with “sudo aticonfig –overlay-type=Xv” typed into the terminal, and then rebooted.
7. To fix the resolution:
   1. sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
   2. under the SubSection “Display” where the depth is 24 I added a mode “1280×1024″
   3. My second monitor was fuzzy, but a hardware auto-adjust fixed it right up.

Applications

Next stop the applications tab. Let’s see what I should remove…. I select show “Installed Applications” and I ended up removing nothing Seems like a nice bare bones install.

Places

Ubuntu found my external drives nicely and when I browsed the network I saw the shared drive from the HP. When I right clicked and selected “Make Link” I received an error “Unsupported operation” (I think this is because I am not logged in as root). So I right clicked the desktop and chose “Create Launcher”, for type I chose file then for location I typed smb://[name of HP computer]/[name of shared folder].

System Preferences

I tweak the following:

• About Me
  • I add in details that are not secret. I’m assuming this data may be used to help automate filling other stuff out later..
• Sessions
  • I removed the Evolution alarm manager, since I use Gmail for my email.
• Screensaver
  • Just had to enable the Matrix screensaver.
  • There are so many cool ones, I would like to use a random option.
• Theme
  • Switched to the “Glossy” theme.
• Desktop Background
  • I installed my favorite desktop wallpaper.

System Administration

• Printing
  • Used the wizard to connect to a printer connected to my other computer. The wizard made it trivial.
• Services Settings
  • Disabled the Bluetooth device management since this computer has not Bluetooth devices.
• Shared Folders
  • I am informed that sharing services are not installed, but a friendly wizard appears to make that process easy.
  • I change my domain/workgroup to match the one I had setup in Windows.
  • I share the two external drives and test that I can access from my other Windows computer (no luck).
  • I restart the Ubuntu machine and all is well.
  • I set up a the samba user by doing the following:
    • sudo smbpasswd -a [username]

For the next installment in this series I will document the process of installing the applications that I need to replace from my Windows environment. Following that post, will be the last entry in this series that will offer a summary and concatenation of all of the entries into one post.