Working on an open source OS can be empowering. Most everything you’d like to do has a relatively simple solution with a common sense approach….IF you can find it. The challenge isn’t about having the freedom of possible solutions, it’s about being able to find, interpret, and judge a multitude of possible solutions in order to determine what the best solution is to a problem you’re experiencing.

A recent example? I’ve always ran 2 monitors on my desktop at home using an nVidia card which is notorious for offering better support to linux based systems. My new office desktop shipped with an ATI card. If you read enough, you could easily find yourself buying a new nVidia based card to solve this one. I strayed for a while on overly complex solutions, installing multiple packages from source etc, until finally landing on a one line solution.

“aticonfig –dtop=horizontal”

With that I have both monitors running beside each other as a single desktop. Simple but unusually complicated to find.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.