29th June 2009

Today decided that it would be nice to see Mint on a much bigger screen than my little Eee 900’s.

Now, the TV has a VGA port on the back, the Eee has one on it’s right side.  All I need is a cable.

So, I popped off to Argos and bought a Belkin Monitor Cable.

£25 FOR A CABLE!!!   *falls over*

After being brought round by a member of staff, I managed to justify the purchase by telling myself “it is well made and feels nice and sturdy and I’ll never have to buy another one…”.  I hope.

So I got home and had a cup of tea to steady my nerves and then fired up the Eee and the TV.  Then I plugged the cable in and switched the TV’s source to PC.

Now, at this point I made mistakes.  Lots of them.  I assumed that by going to System > Preferences > Display, I would be able to configure it.

Stupid boy… 

I spent ages lost in a pair of screens that were somehow joined together, wondering where my pointer had gone and thinking “all I want is big screen Mint.  If I have it on the big screen, I won’t need it on the little one.”

I managed to get it sort of right, but the screen resolution wasn’t very good.

The answer to what I wanted was fairly simple.  And I found it in Synaptic.

I installed the gnome-randr-applet and added it to the panel.

To add applets to the panel, right click an empty space on the panel > Add To Panel and choose from the list.

The new applet is called Display Geometry Switcher.

With that added, it was a simple case of logging out and then back in again and choosing the resolution I wanted (1320×768) by left clicking the applet.

When I choose that resolution, the Eee’s screen switches off.  That’s fine.

A word of warning, when you log out, the login page will not let you see what you are typing.  Just the login page.  This doesn’t affect anything else.  I don’t know why.

And here it is.  Not a particularly good photo, but there you go.

You can’t really see it here, but the display is nice and crisp.  I’m very impressed.

And when you want to remove the cable, either log out and remove it or change the resolution using the applet so that the Eee’s screen comes back on.

So, there you are.  Now, what I really need is one of these (which should work out of the box with Mint) so I can sit on the sofa with my Eee under the TV…

So I’ve had Mint 7 for a couple of weeks now and it’s high time I started sharing the stuff that I’ve learned so far…

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The Keyring Password (23 June 2009).

Now, when I first tried to connect to a wireless network, I was asked to create a password for the keyring.  So I did and I used a different password to my user password.

Then I found that everytime I booted, I was asked for this password before I could connect to my network.  Gwibber, the Twitter client, wouldn’t or couldn’t use the network to access Twitter.  Which, I assumed, was a permissions problem and put it down to something to do with the Keyring.

I found this a bit irritating and went to find a solution.  And here’s what I learnt.

This machine is for my use only, so I didn’t really need to set a Keyring password.

To remove the password and stop the Keyring constantly asking for it, go to:

Applications > Accessories > Passwords and Encryption Keys

Hit the Passwords  tab and then right click the Keyring Password (or whatever it’s called) > Change Password.

You have to put the old password in but then don’t type anything into the other two boxes and hit Change.  A message pops up about lack of security, but that’s fine.  Hit Ok or whatever and then reboot to see the changes.

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Setting up my printer (23 June 2009)

As it happens, we have a new printer.

It’s an HP Deskjet F2280 all-in-one.

I highly recommend HP printers as they are very well supported in Linux.

So, unpacked it, followed the setup instructions and connected it.

There was a short pause while it looked like nothing was happening and then a message popped up telling me that the printer had been installed, set up and was ready for use.  So I opened a document hit print and it printed.

Excellent!

Then, because I’m that way inclined, I wanted to have a nice looking GUI to configure the printer with.  And there is one available for HP printers.

Go to System > Synaptic and search for hplip-gui.  And install it.

Sorted.

Now, to stop it running automatically (I don’t do enough printing to warrant it appearing at startup):

Go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications and untick the HP System Tray Service.

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New Updates Available (23 June 2009).

Some Gstreamer stuff, a window decoration thing and an update to the Intel display drivers (2:2.6.3-0ubuntu9 to 2:2.6.3-0ubuntu9.3).

Let’s see what happens.

*installs updates and reboots*

Well, nothing to report.  It all looks the same.  Which is good.

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