Installing Ubuntu Part I
After having Ubuntu installed on my laptop for a few months now I decided to give it a try installing it on my home desktop system. Werner (my boyfriend) was kind enough to let me resize his (reasonably clean) windows partition so I could install it in the space created. So the story begins....
When I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu Warty to Hoary (the new stable), I had a few problems with automounting USB drives. It turned out hal was having trouble, it was giving hotplugging time out's. I also couldn't see much in the HAL device manager. After about 10 minutes the system would stabilize and everything would work as supposed too. I added my experiences to the existing bug report.
I decided to try and install Hoary on my home system. I downloaded the ISO and off we go... The install went reasonably smoothly, but after install the hal device manager would dissapear right after starting. It turned out it gave some dbus errors, something about an unmatched quote in a file I couldn't even find. After a while of trying to get this fixed I decided to try and install Warty instead and then upgrade the system to Hoary.
The next problem. In partition magic I deleted the exising Linux partitions. Ofcourse booting Windows proved impossible after this, since the grub files where missing. I booted up the (pressed) Warty Install cd and.... it saw one big fat16 partition where two ntfs partitions and 'free space' should be. oh no..... I fiddled in partition magic somewhat with the partitions, to no avail. I finally tried to get windows to boot by running a windows 98/dos boot and running fdisk /mbr which makes the first Windows bootable again. That worked....
After that Warty magically saw the partitions as they really were. I was ready to install... again.
This time the install went smoothly, the device manager was working, and though my external hard disk didn't mount through Firewire, USB was no problem at al. I didn't even have any problems with it after upgrading to Hoary, it would see the disk even at boot time. Must be something with the hardware in my laptop I guess.....
On to the next puzzle - dual monitor setup. I have a Radeon 9550 card with 1 x vga and 1 x dvi with a vga adapter hooked up to two different CRT screens (LG and IIyama, both about 5 years old). During and after install I had a mirrored or cloned setup - both screens showing the exact same thing. So, how to get this done? I got some info on fglrx drivers (which turned out to not work as promised), etc... I finally just fiddled with my xorg.conf using googled information and helpful hints from some Linux knowledgeable people on IRC.
First tip: if you're set on a certain resolution, comment out any others that you don't want. I first set it to 1280 x 1024 with the usual rest-of-the-modes behind it, but somehow it would create a 1280 desktop with a 1024 screen resolution which meant that you had to point the mouse to the edge of the screen to see that move to a hidden part of the desktop. Annoying, and I feel quite useless. I commented out all but the 1280, and it stopped doing that.
Next item - Twinview. I found something on Ubuntu and Dual monitor setups, a howto I believe on ubuntulinux.org, but what you should know is that Twinview is meant for nVidia cards only. You'll want to use Xinerama with other video cards and even with nVidia twinview is often unwanted. More on that in Part II.
Tip 1: make a copy of your xorg.conf file and name it something like xorg.conf-orig. Also do this for the new setup you're doing (i.e. start by editting your xorg.conf and save it as xorg.conf-new, and copy it over xorg.conf when you're ready to try it). Unless you're lucky and get the setup working in one go, you'll be copying back and forth a lot. Not only that, but having an xorg.conf that works (the orig one) that you can always put back will make things a lot easier, when you're trying to google for solutions and/or communicating with people that can help.
So i fiddled with my setup, and finally got a working xorg.conf with Option "Xinerama" "True" in it (at first the biggest problem I had was that I had done a copy & paste which had gone bad, on which it tripped)
Tip 2 - READ the logs carefully. I as a mostly windows user am not used to read error messages and logs thoroughly, because Windows doesn't tend to volunteer anything useful, where so far most problems I experienced in Linux could be solved by paying attention what was said at the occurence of the problem).
Tip 3 - clean your xorg.conf as much as you can: if you know you're going to use a depth of 24 because your hardware can handle it, throw out those other mode lines. This makes it a lot more manageable and readable. The smaller the conf, the better.
After getting the xorg.conf to work, it was still not as it should be. I could move the mouse from the left screen to the right, the desktop background was stretched, but I still saw the same on both screens (except for the mouse cursor). Not only that, but certain applications, such as Firefox would start in the left screen (my secondary) which I couldn't see and I couldn't find a way to move them. So I had to switch back to the old xorg.conf.. a lot... It turned out that fglrx, the driver I was using, needed a DesktopSetup option, and if not found would default to Clone mode, which is ofcourse not what you want. I ran fglrxconfig and saved the created config file under a different name in my home dir, and checked the desktopsetup option for 'big desktop', and put it in my xorg.conf, but still, "No valid DesktopSetup Option specified, use clone mode by default". I couldn't figure out how to set it right (maybe you could set the default somewhere? I don't know). After I figured out that it was fglrx that was mostly the problem I turned back to ati drivers, and voila!! Dual screen!