The Plunge

So, the machine has arrived. It's a Dell Dimension with an Nvidia graphics card in it - I gather this makes life easier. Twin monitors, which is super cool, but I bet it causes some grief somewhere. To make life super ard, I'm sticking with my mac keyboard and MightyMouse. Why? Apart from a masochistic streak, I am just used to the layout of the mac keyboard, which is very different to PCs in the UK - the " is in a much more sensible place. The mighty mouse is just too cool not to use ;)

The Installation
I got the Feisty Beta CD and booted up with it in the drive. Super easy! Within a minute, I'm looking at Ubuntu. The resolution isn't right and it hasn't picke dup my second monitor, but pretty good so far. Installation was a doddle. And then a reboot. Sweet.

What Ain't Quite Right
Quelle surprise? The dual monitors aren't picked up. But everything else seems quite good. The mouse essentially works. The up down scroller even works. I did not expect that. Firefox fires up and connected to the interweb straight away.

The restricted driver manager worked a charm. Added my graphics card, and I can feel the difference in windowing performance, so direct rendering is working.

So a bit of googling and I'm ready to edit my xorg.conf. I didn't intend to do this kind of thing, but I doubt I'll be able to get 2 monitors working without it. Just for the curious, here's the important bits from my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce 7300 LE"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "metamodes" "CRT-0: 1280x1024 +0+0, CRT-1: 1440x900 +1280+124; CRT-0: 880x704 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL; CRT-0: 800x600 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL; CRT-0: 640x480 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL; CRT-0: 1280x1024_75 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "True"
Option "RenderAccel" "True"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

The twinview stuff is what made bth monitors work. Restarted X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace), and all worked fine.

Pushing The Envelope
Ever reckless at heart, I thought that the first thing I'd waste my time with was Beryl. I've always wanted wobbly windows and burnign fire :) Actually, the cube thing seems pretty useful. Beryl install soooo easily. And it ran ok, for about a minute, then froze :( After a few tries at this and googling for reasonable reasons and trying the results, I decided that it's probably TwinView that doesn't like being pushed as much as Beryl pushes it.

The answer to this, surprisingly was Compiz. Compiz installed and worked like a charm. It's nowhere near as flash as Beryl out of the box, but the cube works and that's enough for me.

I 'll post again when I've got everything just how I want it and I've decided the on the applications that I like/dislike.