Et tu Kansas?

I am disheartened to hear that Kansas seems to falling the way of California. The article in the Wichita Eagle gives the brief on the situation. Kansas is in a money crunch with the next weeks payroll in the balance.

Perhaps sobering to think about are the untold millions of outstanding government contracts and pending payees. Beyond the citizenry and their state tax refunds (which are currently on hold) there are the health care providers for their state sponsored Medicaid, the public school programs, and contract labor.

Simply makes me wonder, who is next. . .?

Ubuntu update with some display complications

After an update yesterday that included some linux-headers, my screen resolution for Ubuntu 8.04 was all messed up (I couldn't get anything better then 800x600 on my Dell M1710.

Needless to say I was irritated considering the native resolution should have been 1920x1200 @ 80mhz. I tried doing various reinstalls and removals of things referencing nvidia from synaptic, but didn't get any sucess. A least until I found a reference to a little tool called Envy.

That certainly made things function and could not have been easier. It requires that you uninstall any previous drivers, but I had already taken care of that. Typing sudo apt-get install envyng-gtk got the tool downloaded from the repositories and envyng -t got it running. You get 8 options and have to type in one of the numbers (simple right). I choose 1 since I wanted to install the NVIDIA driver. A few minutes letter I had all the drivers I needed. I also got the sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings package for the GUI tweaks for the display.

Simple as that, or complex as that depending on your perspective. Regardless, I'm now running stably at 1920x1200 @ 79mhz and am loving it.

Ubuntu Hardware Info without a GUI

Getting hardware info from Linux, especially without a graphical manager, looked like an insurmountable task. But after some digging I came across this article about hwinfo.

With a simple (in Ubuntu at least) sudo apt-get install hwinfo you can get a quick view on your system hardware without having to dig through manuals or opening the case. Tie hwinfo with using free -m or free -mt and you have just about all you need.