Archive for December, 2007

Graduation

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

This is my annual look-at-me post.

On this coming Wednesday (the 12th) I will graduate from UCT with a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics. I will receive the degree with distinctions in Computer Science and Mathematics, and with a distinction in the degree overall; I will also be on the Dean’s Merit List. My final marks for this year are:

CSC3002F Computer Science IIIA 91%
CSC3003S Computer Science IIIB 94%
MAM3000W Mathematics III 90%
MAM3004Z Mathematics 304 81%

It actually feels quite weird, to have finally reached this point. For the last three years, I’ve worked away at my courses, but I’ve never really had a feeling that I was actually approaching an endpoint. Now, suddenly, it hits me: I have finished my undergraduate studies. Wow. It’s actually quite a big deal.

Of course, I’m returning to UCT for Honours next year, so it’s not as if what I do with my day is actually going to significantly change (although I will have a much heavier workload). But still. Wow. In a week’s time I’ll be able to style myself Mr. Adrian Frith, B.Sc. (Cape Town). (Although it would be rather pretentious to do that outside of a formal academic setting.)

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XRandR – finally, simple monitor configuration for Linux

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

The most recent Linux distribution releases – Ubuntu 7.10, Fedora 8 and so on – are now shipping with version 1.2 of the XRandR extension for the X server. This allows the user to dynamically change resolutions, refresh rates, and – this is the really impressive thing – switch monitors on and off on the fly. All of this, without ever having to edit xorg.conf, or restart the X server, or reboot. This was one of the major things that the Linux desktop lacked compared to other major operating systems.

Until very recently, using my external monitor with my laptop required several irritating customisations – you can see the details in my earlier post:

  1. To have it switch on, and run in Xinerama mode along with my laptop panel, required fiddling with MetaModes and other fiddly settings of the radeon driver.
  2. To drive it at its native resoution (1440×900) i had to add a custom modeline to xorg.conf (except on Fedora, for some reason).
  3. If the X server originally started without the external monitor attached, then it would have to be restarted to detect the monitor once it was attached. And restarting X means having to log out and lose all my application state.

XRandR 1.2 has removed all three of these irritations. It requires (almost) no preconfiguration, autodetects all resolutions correctly, and detects monitors when they are plugged in without a restart.

Let’s take a brief look at some of what XRandR can do: this is basically what I do with it daily. Note that at the moment graphical tools to control XRandR are still under development and none are really at a releaseable state (in my opinion); but now that the infrastructure exists in the X server and the drivers, tools to control it will come soon. What I use here is the command-line tool, sensibly named xrandr. (more…)

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