Whirliwig’s Weblog

I tried turning on ‘Nice Effects’ in Ubuntu’s Appearance preferences, but received an unhelpful ‘did not work’ error. I think that the next version of Gnome should have a random witticism generator instead. At least then it may disarm the urge to shout at the screen, fist clenched.

It turns out that ‘Nice Effects’ depends on Compiz, and my diddly laptop cannot handle that (at least Compiz won’t build). Bah!

The ‘Didn’t Work’ dialog, and the ‘Because of a Problem’ dialogs in Gnome remind me of a recalcitrant teen serving in a shop, who has been forced to do the job by his parents as they refused to continue supplementing his Mobile Phone account unless he got up and squeezed every ounce of oomph from his meagre motivational reservoir, and did something a little more productive than sitting in his darkened room listening to Emo Classics, Vol 3: The Best Depressing Music In the World, Ever…

Me in shop, to a young person of the above cast: “Excuse me, have you got this in blue?”
Teen: “Dunno…No.”,
Me: “Um, have you looked in the stock room?”,
Teen: “No”…

Have you noticed no matter how much weariness, sadness, irritation (or combination thereof) which you attempt to convey in your expression or voice at that point really doesn’t make any impression whatsoever? Then it dawns on you that this fragment of all of our futures truly does not see any issue, or reason to take further action. You’re an ex-problem.

Back to the Gnome example: the correct error message would be helpful and empathetic. In this case, it (the error message) would tell me—probably addressing me as ‘Sir’–how terribly sorry it was, but it could not fulfil my request as it was missing a vital component, and that unfortunately, to it’s eternal sadness, it cannot use that component on Sir’s behalf, as Sir’s hardware is shall we say, not quite the latest model (the error would pause to convey a potentially distressing fact, and to emphasise its regret). On the other hand, the error might continue, if Sir was in need of a lesser, but still most gratifying enhancement of Sir’s visual and graphical spectacle, then Sir might consider the package just down the road on the left, by the name of ‘xcompmgr’. The error would finish by saying, if Sir was to take possession of suitable hardware in the future, then Sir would of course be most welcome to return to this dialogue, whereupon the manager, Mr Gnome, would personally attend to his needs. Good day.

There you are, teen-boy-in-shop, that’s customer service!

xcompmgr

Some nice settings:

xcompmgr -cCfF -r4 -o.65 -l2 -t2 -D2

The incantations to make it work…

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
	Option	"Composite"	"Enable"
EndSection
...
Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Silicon Motion, Inc. SM720 Lynx3DM"
	Driver		"siliconmotion"
	Option		"UseBIOS"	"off"
	Option		"pci_burst"	"on"
	Option		"fifo_aggressive"	"on"
	Option		"RenderAccel"	"true"
	Option		"AllowGLXWithComposite"	"true"
	BusID		"PCI:0:9:0"
	VideoRam	16384
EndSection

The only thing in the Driver section that is (or may be) necessary is AllowGLXWithComposite. The rest are aggressive acceleration options for SiliconMotion, which do actually seem to speed things up.

I’m not sure about the VideoRam argument. This is stating that the siliconmotion driver should treat the inbuilt graphics card as though it has 16M of Video RAM, when in fact all of the specs show that the Lynx 3DM chip only has 8M of Video RAM. So what’s the point?

Like a lot of this, I don’t have the time to discover the reason, and so it remains a magical incantation that makes me feel better, and is gentler on the skin than repetitive hand-washing.

BTW. I don’t have anything against teens. I was one once.

In Drivel, select MovableType, and enter the following URL: ‘http://<journalName>.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

Vanilla install of Ubuntu 8.xx on MM10, with Ubuntu Desktop (gnome) and encrypted LVM…

1. Didn’t auto-detect monitor. Need to go in and edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf manually

2. longrun not installed by default

3. Authentication seems flaky. Sometimes I am asked several times for my password.

4. To get to a root prompt:

$ sudo su

Optionally, can use ‘passwd’ then to set a root password, which is undefined by default on Ubuntu

5. Suspend doesn’t work.

6. Need to resize fonts a bit — too large for DiddlySharp

7. Otherwise, looking good!