/dev/null productions

After being hopelessly annoyed with Kubuntu 7.Something, I wanted to wipe out the OS and tag it with something new. I guess it’s not the previous Kubuntu that had anything wrong with it, per-se, but there was so little that was done right as opposed to the previous 6.X version I had that I felt it was time to move on.

Of course, I was drawn to the Vista-likeness of KDE4, so that version of Kubuntu seemed the logical way to go. Linux has been very successful on my machine as of late, so I didn’t anticipate any problems.

Hoo-boy, was I wrong.

The first thing I noticed was that I should always use the LiveCD version of the disk first. At least this way I can determine if the built-in X11/Xorg management utilities can change the desktop resolution to something somewhat feasible. Honestly, isn’t the baseline, common computer monitor capable of achieving 1024×768 resolution now? I mean, we have some ancient junk here at the Coast Guard, but every monitor I’ve ever seen here is capable of pulling 1280×1024 at 60 hertz. It’s hard as hell to look at, and makes my eyes go bleary in less than five seconds, but it is capable of pulling it off.

Not so with KDE4. By default, the thing dropped me into 640×480 on my flatscreen monitor and instantly starting searing my retinas. Sighing with a remenescent effect of my old Red Hat 6 days, I hit CTRL-ALT-F1 to drop it into the command line and went into /etc/X11/xorg.conf and starting playing.

Wow. Just wow.

Nothing worked. None of the common stuff worked that I’ve tried before. Despite whatever I put in this file, KDE4 ignored me (except when the syntax broke) and insisted on using 640×480. Forget that I tried to tell it what the monitor is capable of, it absolutely did not want to go above 640×480, even after several dpkg-reconfigure’s and hopelessly digging around in the relevant files.

After 2 fresh re-installs (hoping against hope that SOMEWHERE it would ask me, “What Monitor are you Using?” or “What resolution would you like to try?”, I fired up All-Pro Football 2k8 and told my laptop to download the KDE3 version of this Kubuntu. Sure enough, it defaulted to 1024×768, and changing the resolution to 1280×1024 took all of 2 minutes and no rebooting.

Pitiful.

So apparently there was a database problem, and either it was restored from backup, reset to some default, or something, but yeah. All posts since last February have been lost. Go figure.

Meh.