One horizontal and one vertical monitor for Ubuntu 11.04

I recently had problems configuring Ubuntu with dual screens using an NVidia card - the first screen is horizontal and the second screen is vertical - they are both Dell U2711 monitors. The idea is to be able to have Firebug running on the screen without obscuring the web page.

This should be a simple thing. But from what I can tell NVidia's TwinView driver doesn't support different monitor rotations (under Linux). But having X Windows it should still be easy using dual X Screens. It should just be a matter of going to NVidia X Server Settings, selecting "Separate X Screen" and then selecting "Enable Xinerama". Unfortunately for me, this caused general weirdness where the first screen was mostly black and the second screen was displayed horizontally.

The way I fixed the problem was to disable Compiz. The easiest way I found to disable Compiz was to log in using the "Ubuntu Classic (No effects)" session.

Then it was just a matter of enabling multiple XServers and Xinerama and enabling rotation (RandRRotation). Here are the bits in my xorg.conf to rotate my second monitor to the left:

Section "Monitor" 
    # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid
    Identifier     "Monitor1" 
    VendorName     "Unknown" 
    ModelName      "DELL U2711" 
    HorizSync       29.0 - 113.0
    VertRefresh     49.0 - 86.0
    Option         "RandRRotation" "on" 
    Option         "DPMS" 
EndSection

Section "Screen" 
    Identifier     "Screen1" 
    Device         "Device1" 
    Monitor        "Monitor1" 
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "TwinView" "0" 
    Option         "metamodes" "DFP-2: nvidia-auto-select +0+0" 
    Option         "Rotate" "left"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

When Kworkers Don't

I recently had the problem where kworker threads were taking up 100% on my Ubuntu box.

Various threads seem to suggest the problem lies with interrupts around PCI or power saving features. The thread with the answer that worked for me, "HELP !!! Zombie attack ... (kworker)"

To turn both of them off use:
noapic acpi=off

I found I only needed to turn off acpi though:
acpi=off

Put that in your grub configuration (sudo vi /etc/default/grub) and restart.

I hate not knowing why though.

0 dollars

SCO's Linux Billions?

For the second quarter of 2007, SCO reported a total of zero dollars of revenue from its SCOsource licensing program. In the first quarter of 2007, SCO reported SCOsource licensing revenue of $34,000, which is somewhat less than the billions McBride had been expecting.

Look Twice

An interesting post, "Windows XP, Our New Favorite Legacy Operating System" discusses the ramifications of 5 years without a new version of Windows and subliminal logos (I'll never look at an "Ex" the same way).

We are all focusing on OS X releases (and how Vista is copying OS X) during that time but I haven't found anywhere focusing on the progress of 5 years of Linux development.