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Len Ovens len at ovenwerks.net
Thu Sep 6 16:31:13 UTC 2012


Sorry for a late reply. I don't subscribe to the -user mailing list so I
am just seeing this now:

> 2012/9/6 Melvin Ray Herr <stilllearnin at thettpost.com>
> Seems to me that just one day available for testing is not enough. What
about those of us
> who would like to test but absolutely couldn't get it worked into our
schedule in the
> minuscule amount of time between the call for testers and the release?
>
> The previous release doesn't work very well on my machines. On my laptop
it chews up the
> battery at about 4-5 times the rate that windows does. On my desktop
with multiple
> monitors the screen layout isn't saved between reboots.

Thankyou for the feed back. I agree testing is a head ache.

Battery life: This makes me feel somewhat better. I was wondering why my
battery life went from 3.5 hours to 1.5 so fast. I think I will install
the generic kernel and boot to it when I don't need low latency to see if
that makes a difference. I have never run windows on my netbook so it
should be a generic to lowlatency comparison. It could be a ver 2.6 to 3.2
issue, but I would think there would be more hoopla if that was the case
as that would affect all of ubuntu.

If I look at my use cases, When I need lowlatency, I have power. The
package name is linux for the generic kernel. It should be possible to
choose which one to boot from the boot screen. For straight two track
recording a long latency should work fine.

Dual Monitors:

This one is harder and more painful. It takes two programs to make this
work and even then there are a lot of places for it to fail. Arandr (gui)
or Xrandr(CLI) are used to get the setup you want with two displays. With
arandr there is a save option which I would use to save a backup. With
xrandr I would find what works and create a script as a backup. Once the
settings are in place, go to settings->settings manager and select
Display. It will show the two displays but not the positions. Then to make
it save your setup I change rotation to inverted and back... it doesn't
matter what, just some change so that it will save it's settings.
Now if you reboot the setting should be correct at login.

Where this will fail.... the bad part. If when you boot, one of your
monitors is not plugged in or not powered on, then X and/or xfce (I'm not
sure which) will reconfigure to single diplay and your settings will be
lost. This would be the time to use your back up (see above) to reset
things.

An alternate method, if you feel comfortable with writing a script, is to
write a script to run at session start that has a small delay and then
checks to see if there are two displays and if so runs an xrandr command
to set two displays.

I don't know if X sends a signal or sets some other testable parameter
that could be monitored and used to change things on the fly.

Another gotcha is that unplugging one display in the middle of a session
will leave the remaining display in the middle of the area used by the two
displays so you won't be able to see the main menu to reset things or
logout or do much of any thing. The settings need to be changed to single
with settings first and then remove the second display.

One final note: I don't use dual monitors, I had to borrow one to test all
this stuff with. That means there are probably things I have missed that
using such a setup on a day to day basis would show.  Also, I did not use
any proprietary drivers, so if you are using an nvidia card with the
nvidia driver and not nouveau. I don't know how that works, but I do know
it is different :P  Google ubuntu nvidia dual monitor or some such. If you
are using  nouveau, This should work... I tested this not with a video
montor, but by simulating one by shorting the video out (it looks for
75ohm load) . arandr showed that I could move the displays around just
like with two vga displays, but I did not actually see the video.

-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net




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