Dear expert

It have been a week since I submitted my, paid for, incident at Mandriva Expert and you have still not replied. Please get your finger out of your posterior and answer me! Seriously, I don’t know how long I can live with out my audio controls since I killed pulseaudio, getting annoying having to run alsamixer just to reduce the volume…

drakx11 pains

Anyone familiar with Mandriva knows the drak tools (various GUI’s to configure your desktop, and most of them are quite excellent), and most likely love them. However, I noticed one flaw with the drakx11 tool, which is used to set up your graphic card. I have a troublesome screen and graphic card combo, where my graphic card are unable to read the EDID the screen sends to it (or properly identify the screen).

This means I use an custom EDID file, which I need to enable in my xorg.conf. However, before this is setup, the resolution is set ridicilously low, something like 640×480 (which is a pain to use, nothing fits on the screen). So I have to add the following line to my xorg.conf:

Option “CustomEDID” “DFP-1:/path/to/custom_edid.bin”

Where DFP-1 is the screen identifier assigned by the nVidia driver (you will find this in nvidia-settings). The file is not the problem, I created that using a very good tutorial over at nvnews and my onboard graphic card. However, on reboot, Mandriva sets my resolution to 1366×768, which is pretty reasnoable considering the size of my screen (26 inches). But I still prefer 1920×1080 and compiz fusion with enhanced desktop zoom, which is where the problems with drakx11 comes. Where nvidia-settings will keep your custom options in your xorg.conf, drakx11 will not. This means that after I had changed my resolution in drakx11, Mandriva reverted to the 640×480 resolution, and I reverted to a backup xorg.conf file each and every time until I figured out what was happening.

Still, was an easy fix, just me being stupid about it and expecting drakx11 to behave like nvidia settings…

Jump 01

I have been using Linux at my home computer for a while now, ever since Ubuntu 7.04 (or Feisty). However, randomly I feel that something is wrong with my desktop, and I make the jump to another distro, usually at random.

For the most part I jump between the largest, usually I prefer debian based distro’s as I know where to find stuff there. So for the past year I have been using Ubuntu, and have been happy about that. But the other day the bug bit me again, when my graphic card suddenly reverted to to the built in. While this was due to the fact that one of the connectors to the PSU was loose, I still saw it as a reason to switch.