What's Next 10/6/2015 Geeky Edition

What's Next: A quick look into future technology news

Open Source Kernel Development:

The Linux kernel development community is repeatedly reported to be a source of grief for anyone attempting to penetrate their ranks. Vitriol and insults and questions of the validity of your lineage seem to be the norm. This doesn't make everyone incredibly happy..

So we have a new fork of Linux, and that new guy is in charge or something. Just happened today, maybe it becomes something, maybe it doesn't, at least that guy can sleep easier.

The Quantum Computer are finally on the way:
A team from University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia have demonstrated a two qubit quantum logic gate, built in silicon! They are working on patents and partnerships now.

Linux File Systems:

This is a little better than a rumor. But Mark Shuttleworth today responded to a request to include ZFS in ubuntu by saying that it was upcoming.

ZFS is a robust and powerful filesystem with all the features for RAID and distributed drives. It would be great to get it into Ubuntu. Good luck Mark.

Sophisticated Programming Languages:

Larry Wall has unveiled Perl 6, after over 10years of anticipation.
It's quite the change, one day I will learn this language, yes one day.

X Windows Graphics Drivers problems

Installing the graphics drivers in Linux can be rather tricky, but I recently discovered a way to get out of the command line and into the easier to understand graphical interface. These tips should work for most distributions, but the only one I have done it with is Ubuntu. If your in Debian or Ubuntu and using an ATI or NVIDIA card then Automatix or Envy are definitely the way to go for installing your video drivers. Although envy can also be run in text mode I couldn't get it to work.

I worked on the problem for quite a while and although there is a moderately easy solution I didn't see it anywhere that I looked on the Internet, I don't know if its one of the few remaining "everybody should know that" things in Ubuntu or if everyone else really does use the more complicated methods....

Anyways, here's how to get out of text mode so you can install your drivers. Just change the video driver to vesa!

The easier way to do this (in Ubuntu/Debian) is to type:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

This command runs the Xorg setup script, the very first question is which video driver the server should use, there should be a Vesa driver in that list, just hit enter once you have it highlighted, then just hit enter for the rest of the options (unless you really want to change something else). Then after the program exits just type:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$startx

Of course there is also the good old method of manually editing your Xorg.conf

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Then you need to find the part that looks like:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia" ....

Then just change Driver to "vesa" then save the file and:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$startx

X should start now, it might be a bit slower and not able to do Beryl, but at least you can use this mode to get Envy or Automatix going and get the proper drivers installed without having to muck about in the CLI. :D

(P.S. if I got anything wrong Please correct me in the comments)