George’s Wonder Blog

It was time to look for new wallpaper for my desktop, but this time I had a new idea - a wallpaper for each monitor! Since my friend had already told me about the Google Pack (Google Pack requires Windows XP or Vista. Here is Mac Version) I already have the dual monitor Google Photos Screensaver. Now it was time for dual monitor wallpaper!

The first site I found was http://www.csbmb.princeton.edu/~smcclure/dualmonitor.html posted by S. McClure of Princeton University, and as a nice added touch they are completely free. As a bonus since the page is on princeton.edu I felt 100% safe.

My Google Search for dual monitor wallpapers was fruitful as well, and not surprisingly some of the pages there also had some of S. McClure’s dual monitor wallpapers, I will assume with permission.

This is great! No longer am I stuck with 2 monitors displaying the same exact wallpaper, now it simply stretches across both monitors.

TIPS TO GETTING YOUR DUAL WALLPAPERS ‘WORKING’

1. In Windows XP, and I assume other operating systems and Windows verisons, you have to set the wallpaper to ’tile’, otherwise it may not appear correctly.

2. You may have to re-size the wallpapers, especially if you have 2 different sized monitors.

3. There are lots of wallpapers, so look for nice, hi-res shots that are already wide, VS those that are merely smaller versions stretched out. I saw some of the latter and they weren’t very attractive stretched across all of that monitor real estate.

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, Day 2

Today I tried setting Visual Effects from none to normal to see some cool visual effects (System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects tab). I was disappointed when it didn’t work due to my system specs (the 2nd paragraph on the Upgrading from 7.04 to 7.10 post mentions some) but I was pleased when I realized Linux was getting more out of my NEC Multisync 70 monitor than:

• Windows with the Nvidia driver or…
• Linux with the Nvidia Legacy drivers

The max screen resolution using the Nvidia drivers was 800×600. But Linux, without the Nvidia drivers, runs the monitor at 1280×1024, the maximum resolution recommended by the manufacturer!

I also decided to subscribe to an RSS feed, so for expediency I used Mozilla Thunderbird which is already installed. I googled for a ubuntu tips and ended up choosing http://www.ubuntugeek.com/ as my first RSS.

I heard this one from my daughter.

What do you get when a snowman bites you?

Frost bite.

I’m a novice Linux user, although I’ve used Linux on and off for about 10 years. Most of that 10 years has been OFF without Linux, so each time I start over I have to learn everything all over again.

The history with my Linux machine… where to start? Its an HP Pavilion 8766c (an old PC with a 900MHz P3, and 128 to 256 512MB RAM). It has had about 5 different distros of Linux on it during the past several years. Right now its running Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) but I’ve been getting error messages while updating packages recently. A couple of months ago the Linksys EtherPCI LAN Card II network card died on me.

Well recently I installed a Network Everywhere NC100U-WM network card ($15 at Wal-mart) and it got right back online with no configuration! I was pleasantly surprised, and ready to do some updates. Naturally I got some error messages. that’s when I saw the “Upgrade” button to upgrade to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). The upgrade attempt was riddled with error messages so I decided to “wipe the system clean”. Last time I tried installing Ubuntu on Ubuntu it didn’t work for me. So I decided to install another distro (temporarily) and then re-install 7.04 fresh right back on top of it all, giving me a clean, “factory fresh” install.

After my re-install of 7.04 I did an update, about 266 updates to be exact, and I had no error messages. Great start! Next I clicked that “Update” button again and the system has now successfully been upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibson).

Now I have to get ready to install all of the items I need (Adobe Flashplayer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, etc…) and other software packages later.