Laney's blog

A little while ago I blogged about problems that I was experiencing in Ubuntu, one of which was that the display would blank regardless of what was set in gnome-power-manager (System -> Preferences -> Power Management). I'm happy to report that I found a workaround for this, thanks to Michael Holloway on the ubuntu-uk mailing list. If you find that your display is blanking inexplicably, try appending this to your xorg.conf (hit alt-f2 and type gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf):

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "BlankTime" "0"
Option "StandbyTime" "0"
Option "SuspendTime" "0"
Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection

Save and restart your computer (or log out and restart X by hitting ctrl-alt-backspace), and everything should be fixed. Play a video and leave it and marvel at how you don't have to move the mouse once every 10 minutes to keep it displaying! Also, I noted that on Xubuntu gnome-screensaver wasn't started by default, meaning that no power management settings would work any more. This is easily solved by going to Settings -> Autostarted Applications and adding an item to start /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver when you login.

Here's the launchpad bug for anyone interested in tracking the issue.

This is me joining in the new years fun. Here are my resolutions for 2008, unordered:

• Finish degree, get a 1st
• Get an offer of a PhD place, and take it up in September
• Go swimming more often
• Get involved with Ubuntu, try some packaging, maybe MOTU
• See home friends more

Not many, and not too ambitious, I hope. Except maybe the PhD bit.

Anyways, I'm really enjoying my eee so far. The only things that annoy me a bit are the small keyboard (with weird right shift placement, on the right of the up arrow key, wtf?) and the flakiness of the built in wireless manager, which just seems generally hard to use. Oh, and Thunderbird isn't very enjoyable on such a small screen. Usable though. The folks over at eeeuser.com seem to have done all sorts of crazy things with theirs, and it is fast becoming my first port of call when I want to do anything. After I get back up to uni tomorrow I'll be able to pick up my new SDHC card and RAM and install eeeXubuntu, which should (barring any problems) make it perfect.

Now I'm off to pack and revise. Oh, what joy.