Happy to report that using the non-beta drivers (8776) stopped that odd issue from happening again. Hope those beta drivers get that issue fixed. Suppose I’ll look for a place to report the bug.

Also – if you’re using an HDTV with a PC…you’ll soon find out that everything looks washed out. You can fix some of that using the nvidia-settings tool. To access it, run this in the terminal:

sudo nvidia-settings

You’ll soon find out that your great settings aren’t being applied when you log out and back in (or reboot, etc.). You’ll need to load this utility’s settings when ubuntu starts. To do so, add this line to the System->Preferences->Sessions->Startup Programs area:

nvidia-settings --load-config-only

That should do it! Soure: Ubuntuforums

Odd GNome issue.

I’ve been busy reinstalling Ubuntu Linux today. Everything was working dandy except for the fact that I had partitioned my / too small and my xfs partition WAY too small. Some may say that I could have enlarged these – oh well.

My first round of reinstallation used the Nvidia beta drivers & Beryl. I had 2 system freezes while updating packages and decided that Beryl just wasn’t going to cut it for me. I’m sure it will improve in the future…so I’ll install it in the future. I quickly disabled Beryl and was back to using Metacity with the Nvidia beta drivers. I moved the PC back to my HDTV (as the Ubuntu Live CD uses a refresh rate too high for my HDTV to install) and changed the resolution to match the widescreen goodness. Everything looked great so I shut it down and did some non-nerdy things for a while. Upon coming back and booting up the box, I was greeted with some odd issues in GNome. Specifically – the little red shut down button in the top right had moved several inches to the left. The trash can did the same thing. Odd! I couldn’t find any help on the Internet for this issue…and no configuration menu. That’s one thing that GNome really needs – more configuration options for panel stuff.

Back to the office with the PC. I figured this had something to do with the leftover of Beryl. I reinstalled everything…and moved back into the living room. Same results. Yuck!

Back to the office again and here I sit. It’s updating right now, then I’ll proceed to change the kernel and install the non-beta Nvidia driver. Seeing as how this is what I did when the partitions were too small and this little quirk NEVER happened…

I found a great thread about changing your kernel in Ubuntu. It’s not compiling your own or anything – but it’s what I needed: Ubuntuforums . One odd thing I noticed is that your new kernels are signified in GRUB as being generic. I suppose I was expecting something about K7-SMP. It is in fact using that kernel though. Definitely shows 2 cores when monitoring the system.

UPDATE: According to page 25 of that thread, Ubuntu 6.10 has made several kernel options obsolete…so don’t even bother following the guide if you’re on 6.10. Just check your kernel with [ uname -a ] in the terminal to see that you’re already running a 686-smp kernel.

I’ll update here in a while on the strange HDTV/beta-Nvidia/Gnome issue. It’s truly annoying and I hope it doesn’t decide to continue happening.