Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Small update:

Recently I installed Linux Mint 15 KDE when it came out. Using the hardware acceleration from the nouveau drivers seems to have acceptable performance and using nouveau+kde means the desktop resolution changing is much better than it is under nvidia with my script. KDE's compositor works really well with this screen. So far I'm quite happy with it, although I need to see how well really intensive programs work. Portal worked quite happily with nouveau and mesa and that library set before it crashed, but I'm not sure whether that was a function of graphics or something else, as there weren't any error messages.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

If you are using an ubuntu-based distro on a macbook pro retina, I recommend grabbing this package here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/raring/bcmwl-kernel-source, as the latest version of the bcmwl package supports the BCM4331 card of the macbook pro retina, and it has support for more modes than the b43 drivers do.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Changing the Resolution in Ubuntu

Well, after having this set up, I wanted to be able switch resolutions (the screen is really tiny, and it drops the frame-rate of games rather significantly)  I tried all of the standard xorg.conf configuration, addmode, newmode, all of that.  But nothing worked.

Today, I stumbled on a solution:  xrandr's --scale option.  This allows you to scale that screen to almost any resolution you want.

 for example:
  • xrandr -q 
(this returns certain names e.g. mine is DP-2. Another is HDMI-0.  One will say "connected" and that's the one you need.
  • xrandr  --output DP-2 --scale .5x.5 
This scales it to a 1440x900 resolution.

One thing to note.  Sometimes trying to go from one scaled resolution to another will fail with an error.  Don't panic:  just change the scale back to 1x1, and the next scale you choose will work. The scaling numbers don't have to be simple: I managed to get ~1650x1050 by putting the scale value as .5729x.5729.


Here's a link to the script:  https://gist.github.com/4552263/

This script takes one parameter: the width in pixels of your screen.

Sample run:

   sh ./Res.sh 1680

The result is a 1680x1050 scaled screen.

EDIT:  I found a way to fix the trackpad settings.
I followed this advice here:  uselessuseofcat.com/?p=74ls,
but it didn't quite help with the trackpad's tap-click.
I then found this package: gpointing-device-settings

    sudo apt-get install  gpointing-device-settings

This installs a utility that is launched by running
gpointing-device-settings
in the terminal.

This is a graphical configuration for your trackpad, so you should be able to customize your mouse however you want.