Linux Tips and Tricks

So, I finally decided to crack out the new Ubuntu release, and the installer seemed to be successfull and it was time to reboot the machine which is where things went terribly wrong. My login screen was a blank screen.

So I then pushed CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to a shell, and noticed that by default the ati opensource video driver in xorg.conf wasnt happy at all.

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "vesa"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
EndSection


So after googling a bit, i discoverd that support for this Radeon Series of cards was updated in later releases of the fglrx driver. Which can be enabled in 5 easy steps.

1. Remove all references to the older fglrx driver.

sudo apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-kernel-source

2.Update the sources list

sudo apt-get update

3. Reinstall the newer drivers

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx-kernel-source jockey-gtk xserver-xorg-video-radeon

4. Enable the fglrx drivers

sudo aticonfig --initial

5. Restart gdm

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

We can now verify that we have the right driver installed by using fglrxinfo.
osamad@root:~$ fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT
OpenGL version string: 2.1.8087 Release


And voila, I then was able to launch the ATI Catalyst Control Center from the menu system Applications > Accessories
> ATI Catalyst Control Center , and used that to enable my dual monitors.

After that I enabled the desktop effects and installed the compizconfig-settings-manager
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
System > Preferences > Compiz Config Settings Manager to enable my desktop cube! And now am a happy camper!

Setup

Ever want to access a windows share from your terminal? Well using ‘ mount ‘ and cifs/samba this is a snap.

Make sure you have smbfs/cifs support, on ubuntu linux distributions you can simply type
apt-get install smbfs
Now we need to make a directory on our hard disk where we can mount our windows share.
mkdir /mnt/location

Mounting Windows Share

Now we\’re ready to mount the filesystem on our newly created directory (/mnt/location).

Mount with cifs
mount -t cifs //server-ip-or-name/share /mnt/location -o username=user,password=pass,domain=DOMAIN
Mount with smbfs
mount -t smbfs //server-ip-or-name/share /mnt/location -o username=user,password=pass,domain=DOMAIN

Clean Up

When finished with our windows mount, we should exit the directory, or close any windows that are accessing it, and then unmount the Microsoft Windows NTFS share by using the following series of commands.

cd /; umount /mnt/location