As of today, Ubuntu had come to its 9.10 version, named Karmic Koala. Ubuntu is a Linux based operating system, built mostly from Debian. To some extent is a good alternative for paid Operating Systems (Windows, Mac OS etc.). If you intend to use this OS mostly for Internet surfing, programming, learning, image manipulation, testing and some other tasks it is a good choice to install it on your computer.

Windows emulation application

Wine lets you run Windows software on other operating systems (like Linux). You have to note that not every application will run, but users tested and reviewed more thousands applications. Application database has more than 13,000 entries with applications that work on various OSes.

Updating your Operating System

This operation can be done using two methods. First you can use the Update Manager (which can be find under System –> Administration.

After you press the Check button you will be prompted for your user session password. After this step, if any updates available, you can install them, all or partially based on your selection.

The other method can achieve the same result using the command prompt terminal. Terminal can be found under Applications –> Accessories.

In the terminal you can type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

The apt-get command is a powerful command-line tool used to work with Ubuntu’s Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) performing such functions as installation of new software packages, upgrade of existing software packages, updating of the package list index, and even upgrading the entire Ubuntu system.

First command updates the package index; the APT package index is essentially a database of available packages from the repositories defined in the /etc/apt/sources.list file.
Second command upgrades packages; from time to time, updated versions of some packages currently installed on your computer become available from the package repositories.

The sudo command will run the commands as super user and you’ll be prompted for your user session password. After the system update you can run sudo apt-get autoclean to clear out the local repository of retrieved package files. More details about apt-get command can be found if you ran in a terminal the command man apt-get.

Configuring the Xorg X server

Because, even it is based on Linux kernel, Ubuntu has a Graphic User Interface, I’ll present an useful application for modifying the X-server parameters, even the application is not supported anymore, Xorg-edit. The author’s home page can be found here.

After you compile the application, it can be found under System –> Administration section. Every time you’ll run the application you will be prompted for your user session password, to gain super user rights.

The application’s window presents six tabs: Device, Monitor, Input Device, Screen, Server and Other Options. Each one will give you the option to add or to modify X-server parameters, and to test them before you restart X-server. But, please note that, the modifications will be effective only after you restart the Xorg X-server.

Device Section

Using the lspci -v | grep VGA command in a terminal you’ll find the information regarding the graphic display controller. Note that information.
On Device tab click on the drop-down list indicator and chose “Add Device” option. After this type in the name of your VGA controller (i.e.: S3 Inc. VT8375 [ProSavage8 KM266/KL266], this is the name the VGA controller for my testing laptop).

On “Driver” option you can chose the driver for your graphic card from the drop-down list. The BusID can be found using the command in a terminal lspci | egrep “AGP|PCI Express|VGA|Display” (which is similar with the command above, and in my case the output is 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. VT 8375 [ProSavage8 KM266/KL266]). So, the BusID is 01:00.0, and should be associate with the computer bus that the graphic card uses (in my case I added PCI:01:00:0; note the double dot between the 01 and 00 and between 00 and 0, which is different from the output of the lspci command (i.e.: 01:00.0)).

On “Video Ram” option you can add the amount of RAM memory in KB that the graphic card is using. This option is not mandatory (as the Manual page for Xorg X-server says).

“Screen Number” option is mandatory for cards where a single PCI entity can drive more than one display, range from 0 to one less than the total number of heads per entity.

This options appear by default on Device tab, but you have the option to add new one along with its value.

Monitor Section

In this section you have the possibility to define parameters for your displaying device. The mandatory entry for this section is the Identifier which is an unique name for the monitor.

In the Hor.Sync field you can input the range(s) of horizontal sync frequencies supported by the monitor and it’s measured in KHz. If you are unsure about this range you can input a minimum value (take 20 KHz) and a maximum value (120 KHz) separated by a dash and it should be enough to cover your monitor horizontal sync frequency.

In the Vert.Refresh field holds vertical refresh frequencies supported by the monitor and the units are in Hz. As for Hor.Sync frequency you can specify a range of values (with minimum an maximum value) to cover the monitor’s vertical refresh frequency.

The display size gives the width and height, in millimeters, of the picture area of the monitor, is optional and is useful to calculate the DPI of the screen.

The Modeline entry is a more compact version of the Mode entry, and can be used to specify video modes for the monitor. is a single line format for specifying video modes. The format is “name” – mode description. The mode-description is in four sections, the first three of which are mandatory. The first is the dot (pixel) clock. This is a single number specifying the pixel clock rate for the mode in MHz. The second section is a list of four numbers specifying the horizontal timings. These numbers are the hdisp, hsyncstart, hsyncend, and htotal values. The third section is a list of four numbers specifying the vertical timings. These numbers are the vdisp, vsyncstart, vsyncend, and vtotal values.. So we can assume that the values from second and third section creates pairs which represents the screen resolution.

Input Device Section

In this section is useful for input device configuration and it contains parameters for at least two devices: one for the core (primary) keyboard, and one of the core pointer.

The default options may or may not work for all hardware configurations.

Screen Section

A “screen” represents the binding of a graphics device (Device section) and a monitor (Monitor section).

The Default Depth specifies which color depth the server should use by default. The -depth command line option can be used to override this. If neither is specified, the default depth is driver-specific, but in most cases is 8.. 24 should be maximum for most graphics devices.

Each Screen section may have multiple Display subsections and they are optional. You can set different modes and options for displaying device if you want to override the default settings.

Server Section

A “server layout” represents the binding of one or more screens (Screen sections) and one or more input devices (InputDevice sections) to form a complete configuration. If no ServerLayout sections are present, the single active screen and two active (core) input devices are selected as described in the relevant sections above.

Other Options Section

The DRI section (optional) is used to provide some information for the Direct Rendering Infrastructure. In simple terms, the DRI enables hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on Linux. More specifically, it’s a software architecture for coordinating the Linux kernel, X window system, 3D graphics hardware and an OpenGL-based rendering engine.

The Extensions section is used to specify which X11 protocol extensions should be enabled or disabled. The Extensions section is optional, as are all of the entries that may be specified in it.

The Module section is used to specify which Xorg server modules should be loaded. This section is ignored when the Xorg server is built in static form. The type of modules normally loaded in this section are Xorg server extension modules. Most other module types are loaded automatically when they are needed via other mechanisms. The Module section is optional, as are all of the entries that may be specified in it.

The Files section is used to specify some path names required by the server, and is an optional entry.

Saving settings

After you entered your configuration data, before you save them, you have the option to test the x-server hitting the F7 key. If no errors present a message will be displayed saying that the configured server works well and you can see a log file that contains the result of the tested parameters. Seeing that message you can assume that you’ve entered valid values accepted by the x-server, but, too see if you entered the right values for your hardware configuration you have to restart the x-server (the simplest way, reboot the system).

Before you make any changes to your configuration xorg.conf file, located in /etc/X11/ directory, make a backup copy of it, to restore the settings if something goes wrong and your system will be unusable. Also, BE SURE that YOU KNOW EXACTLY what you are doing.

References:

xorg.conf – Configuration File for Xorg X server
Building DRI
Introduction to DRI