Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Mon 26th Jun, 2006

Adventures In Ubuntu part 001

After a weekend away in Canberra doing some of what I like best - visiting friends, dancing, drinking Brown Brothers' Orange Muscat And Flora - I've come up to Brisbane for a week with my family. This means I haven't had a chance to respond to Leon's criticism of my criticism of the "Copy A Cat" intelligent design argument; which everyone should probably be thankful for (short answer: I like Leon but I think the "Copy A Cat" argument is stupid and Intelligent Design is a fundamentally flawed idea and rooted in sinister, messianic soil). First stop: my brother's new place with his girlfriend, for a day or two of geeking out. The signs are good so far - there are four monitors across the desk here, and we've got Ubuntu PPC version on a Mac G4 that's going to become a new router for my Dad and his boarders.

Problem one was that the login screen was booting into too high a resolution; it was installed when it had a much nicer larger screen and this poor little 15" LCD screen can't do 1280x1024. (In fact, the first problem was remembering a login which actually worked after I'd last touched it a month or more ago. Fortunately, I have yet to thrash out of my brother the habit of using the same password on his internal systems...) It turns out that the solution, at least for Ubuntu 5.1, is to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf so that the resolution you want comes first in the Screen -> Display -> Modes line. Helpful. I can only assume that this is handled better in Dapper Drake and so forth; it's handled much more nicely in Fedora. Maybe it should go with the rest of the "login screen" options?

Now to figure out the various iptables rules we need to run this as a headless four-port router that limits the bandwidth on each port in inverse proportion to how much downloading they've done in the last month... (If we can get the four networks to just be separate and have its own DHCP server, though, I'll be more than happy.)

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