Dual Monitor Setup with ATI Graphics Cards in Ubuntu

I’ve recently bought an ATI Radeon HD5450 in order to be able to use multiple displays in Windows XP and Ubuntu 11.04. I’ll explain how to install and configure the ATI drivers in order to use multiple displays and extend the desktop on two monitors. The first thing to do is to install the proprietary ATI drivers and Catalyst Control Center. Click on the icon at the top right of the screen and select “System Settings” in the drop down menu. Then click on “Additional Drivers”, Ubuntu should detect your ATI graphics card automatically and show the following: Click on “Activate” to download and install ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver and Catalyst Control Center (CCC). Alternatively, you could also download the latest linux ATI driver (version 11.12) on ATI website and run ./ati-driver-installer-11-12-x86.x86_64.run After installation, you may have to restart you computer. Once the drivers are installed, if you use […]

Copy/Paste Text between Windows XP Host and Ubuntu Guest in VirtualBox

I’ve recently upgraded the amount of memory and graphics card in my computer to order to be able to smoothly run virtual machines and support 2 monitors. So instead of using dual boot for Windows XP and Ubuntu, I’m now running Ubuntu in VirtualBox. One thing, I wanted to do is to copy text from the right screen (e.g. Instructions in Web Browser in Windows XP) to the left screen where I have Ubuntu 11.10 running in VirtualBox. This does not work right out of the (virtual)box however. The procedure to enable “Shared Clipboard” is straightforward. First, you need to install the guest additions. While Ubuntu is running, click on “Devices->Install Guest Additions” in VirtualBox top menu, this will start the installation in Ubuntu, simply enter you root password until the installation completes. Restart Ubuntu and you should now be able to copy/paste text between the host and guest machines. […]

Build the bootloaders (U-boot & X-Loader) for Pandaboard

I’ve tried to compile u-boot and x-loader for Pandaboard by following the instructions given at http://omappedia.org/wiki/Get_started_with_ubuntu_on_omap4#Bootloaders. I did this in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with Linaro gcc compiler. Here are the instructions for the build: Create the folders:

Get u-boot and checkout the omap4_dev branch:

You may use a different tag. Simply run “git tag -l | grep L24” to see the list of tags. (I used the latest at the time of this post). Build u-boot for OMAP4

At this point, you should get U-boot (u-boot.bin). get x-loader and checkout the omap4_dev branch:

N.B: Both u-boot and x-loader folders must be at the same directory level. build x-loader for OMAP4:

The x-loader (MLO) should now be ready. Finally, you simply need to copy MLO and u-boot.bin files to the SD card. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting […]

Ubuntu Smartphone and Television UI Mockups

Ubuntu developers announced they wanted to port their OS beyond desktop by 2014, and would like to use it on smartphones, tablets and televisions. Following the announcement, the community has made a few mockup. Here are a few samples: Unity Mobil Mockup by JMMING: I quite like this design (Samsung Nexus Series U) similar to Android with the Ubuntu theme. My Ubuntu Phone by Musl1m: muls1m mockup is also based an icon grid, but keeps the Ubuntu icon bar on the left.  Ubuntu with mobile Unity by ginjaninja405 This mockup is similar to the one above, but the icon bar can be located either to the left or to the right, and  the bottom image shows phone related notifications such as missed phone calls, SMS and Facebook messages and notifications. There are also other interesting Ubuntu smartphones mockup, including a full phone design (casing + UI) based on Ubuntu theme. If […]

Remmina : Remote Connection via RDP, VNC, SSH, XDMCP or SFTP

If you need to connect to both Windows and Linux machines remotely,  Remmina is what you need. It is an application that can remotely connect to server using VNC, SSH, XDMCP, SFTP and RDP protocols. So that you can connect to a Windows machine using the default RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) protocol without installing a VNC server. In the screenshot below I setup a Windows RDP and a VNC connection to 192.168.0.102. There are plenty of options. Here’s a screenshot of Remote Desktop Preferences for the RDP client. To install in an Ubuntu or Debian distribution:

To install it in Fedora:

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011. www.cnx-software.com

Turn your TV into a Computer with FXI Technologies Cotton Candy USB Stick

FXI Technologies has unveiled a USB stick that turns any screen into an a computer running Android or Ubuntu, and in the future Windows 8 will also be supported. The Cotton Candy will include a Samsung Exynos 4210 dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU clocked at 1.2GHz, with a Quad Core Mali 400MP  GPU, like the Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone. It will also feature 1GB of RAM, a microSD slot capable of holding up to 64GB of flash memory, Wifi and Bluetooth connectivity and an HDMI port. This small device (it measures 8cm x 2.5cm) has decent multimedia capabilities as it can support 1080p decode of MPEG4-SP/H.263/H.264 AVC/MPEG-2/VC1, as well as MP3, AAC, AAC+, Real Audio decoding and JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG pictures. Extra third party codec can also be added. There are 2 main use cases for the Cotton Candy: Connection to a HDMI-capable TV or Display: Connect an HDMI monitor/TV […]

DLNA/UPnP Linux Server with Coherence

Coherence is a DLNA/UPnP Media Server written in Python which exports local files or online media to UPnP clients. Coherence fetch the media files from several sources such as: Local applications media collections, like those from Rythmbox or Banschee, Audio-CD or DVB Online services like Flickr, last.fm, YouTube, Picasa Web Albums and other. Other sources can also be added thanks to Coherence plug-in architecture. The media server supports transcoding (currently experimental) that is to convert media files in another format. Coherence toolkit also contains other packages such as: Coherence-Config: a cross-platform GUI frontend for ‘Coherence’. Cadre: a picture DLNA/UPnP MediaRenderer which can display pictures from the local filesystem or from a MediaServer. Mirabeau: An application level proxy for UPnP devices which allows to share your UPnP content between two or more local networks over the Internet. It uses XMPP as a transport (work in progress). UPnP-Inspector:  a graphical UPnP Device […]

Enable OpenGL 2.0 and WebGL for Intel GMA3150 in Ubuntu

I wanted to use WebGL in my Acer Aspire One D255E netbook that uses an Intel GMA 3150 onboard graphics card, but it did not work in Chromium nor Firefox. WebGL requires OpenGL 2.0 support, but I found out I only had support for OpenGL 1.4:

But I found out it was possible to enable OpenGL 2.0 for GMA 3150 in Linux by installing and running driconf:

and clicking on “Enable limited ARB_fragment_shader support on 915/945.” and “Enable stub ARB_occlusion_query support on 915/945.” options. They are not enabled by default because they do cause problems. After those two options were enabled, OpenGL 2.0 was enabled.

But I still could not use WebGL in either Chromium nor Firefox, so I decided to install the latest version of Mesa (7.11) with indirect rendering (software) enabled with libOSMesa:

Even with the latest Mesa library, I could not use WebGL […]

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