Archive for August, 2008
Facebook Chat, Making My Life More Complicated
When Facebook added the chat feature a few months ago, I found it to be entirely unnecessary. All the people with whom I wished to chat were already in my MSN, AIM, and GoogleTalk contact lists, which are all tied together by Pidgin.
Dear Xinerama: Goodbye, and Good Riddance
Having used many distros of Linux with a variety of graphics cards during the past five or so years, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to get my hands dirty with xorg.conf. When I eventually got an Nvidia card and discovered nvidia-settings, it was great to not have to mess with xorg.conf any more…or not. I still had to read up on xorg.conf options whenever I wanted to do something fancy, but I found nvidia-settings to be a useful tool for generating xorg.confs that I could later modify.
A few years ago I started using two monitors with my desktop computer. In nvidia-settings I had two options for configuring the monitors: either with TwinView or Separate X servers. Separate X servers is hugely annoying, so that was out. TwinView made my window manager (Fluxbox, at the time) think that I basically had one screen. This meant that maximizing applications caused them to fill both screens. It also meant that no edge snapping occurred at the border between the monitors. I have seen experienced the same behavior with TwinView in Xfce. This means that for at least two years I’ve associated TwinView with pure suck.