Quote:
Originally Posted by jwallace15
For everyone who has asked about me not being able to get 640X480 resolution to work, I'm sure I can if I had a bigger monitor to change the settings to in the first place. However, I don't have any other monitor that I can use to change the setting to.
I'll look into the x config file.
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I tried installing PuppyLinux in an Oracle VirtualBox VM on my RedHat 6 Workstation Lenovo T61 laptop. I gave the virtual machine 512MB of my RAM and 4GB of storage on my SATA SSD. I had some interesting issues getting it to install and clearly the process for installing without booting into the GUI mode of the 'LiveCD' needs a bit of work. I was able to install the frugle hard drive installation by setting a kernel parameter at boot, going directly to a prompt without X-Windows and then doing this a way that from the 1990s might be the normal but that's a bit too much to lay on you as a student.
So currently I am using the 'Lubuntu i386 (Intel 386) Alternate Install' ISO that installs from a TUI, with ext4 file system, guided partitioning, 512MB of RAM onto a 4GB fixed size VMDK virtual disk. I have yet to have to type a single command at a prompt. However the ISO is much larger and this install will take longer. I can't be sure when you say 'flash drive' if you mean a plug-in USB flash drive. If you do mean a plug-In USB flash drive Google the directions to install Lubuntu from a USB flash drive (you can still use the ISO below if you substitute it). Just in case you mean that you don't just want to install from the USB flash drive, but actually want to use the USB flash drive as the Lubuntu drive, you need to Google the directions for pendrive Lubuntu. In one case you are installing from the USB flash drive to an internal storage device (so the USB flash drive contains the ISO that would normally be a 'LiveCD') in the other Lubuntu runs on the USB drive and there probably is no internal storage (Lubuntu is actually installed on the USB flash drive).
Here's where you get the ISO:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu/Alternate_ISO
Click the button for "PC 32bit Standard image disk" or use Torrent.
In my testing outlined below I have created 4GB of virtual internal storage (looks like a hard drive to Lubuntu) and I have mounted the ISO linked above as a virtual machine CD-ROM drive via Oracle VirtualBox. Therefore I can boot to that virtual CD-ROM by pressing F12 in the Oracle VirtualBox boot screen (BIOS).
After installing Lubuntu the guided partitioning put about 500MB of the 4GB virtual drive space into a swap partition.
The guided partitioning left about 42% of the remaining 3.5GB (that's about 1.4GB free).
Chromium works with NAT to my wireless card to my cellular phone hot spot immediately.
Now that Lubuntu is installed without much modification or tweaking...
At this point it wants to install about 140MB of updates to the 13.04 release (so that will consume space).
I got Perl 5.14.2 and Python 2.7.4 by default just doing the install and no GCC (so that would consume space).
Java/OpenJDK is not installed by default, but you do get sed and awk (so Java would consume space).
Running 'Task Manager' shows 150MB of the 512MB of physical RAM in use during the updates.
With AbiWord (word processor) I consumed a mere additional 7MB of physical RAM.
With Chromium (Internet browser) I consumed 20MB more of physical RAM.
Under 'Preferences' in 'Monitor Settings' I reduced the installation from 1024x768 screen resolution to 640x480.
Chromium is still usable (you'll be scrolling a lot if you don't adjust the zoom).
Abiword is still usable.
With LXTerminal in the GUI the text is *really* tiny so I changed the font size to 12 point.
Lubuntu has xrandr installed.
So xrandr can set the X-Windows screen resolution from the command prompt.
That will not impact the login screen.
I noticed that the vi(m) editor in my copy of lubuntu is acting strange on this install so I am using nano.
I am not going to completely hand hold with this....if you need that let me know:
1. You need to create a Bash 4 script that looks like this:
Quote:
!#/bin/sh
xrandr --output default --primary --mode 640x480
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It is possible on your system that 'default' should be something else but let's hope not.
I called that vga.sh and put that in: /usr/share/
I did a: chmod 775 vga.sh on that Bash 4 script.
I created that script while I was elevated to root privilege using: sudo su
2. You need to tell lightdm to run that script when it starts:
In: /etc/lightdm/
Edit the file: lightdm.conf
Add this line to the bottom:
Quote:
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display-setup-script=/usr/share/vga.sh
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That will impact the login screen.
3. Now we need to force the normal X-windows and window managers:
You need to edit some files in: /etc/xdg/lxsession/
There are 3 folders in Lubuntu 13.04 for different install types they are:
/Lubuntu/
/Lubuntu-Netbook/
/Lubuntu-Nexus7/
Each of those 3 folders has a text file called autostart.
Edit each of those autostart files and add this to the bottom:
Quote:
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@xrandr --output default --primary --mode 640x480
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Notice how similar it looks to the script in instruction 1?
You need to add that to all 3 autostart files (one in each directory).
4. Reboot and that should get your GUI working.
Now you'll no doubt wonder....but if the GUI doesn't work in the first place....
You can use CTRL-ALT-F2 or in VirtualBox usually 'right CTRL'-F2 to get to one of the other TTY sessions.
Got all that?
Clear as mud right?
If you can't follow let me know.
After completing the System Updates listed above and tweaking a few more things I ended up with around 1GB of the 4GB virtual disk free for whatever I like. Wow I can like....fit 1/100,000th of the database I was working on while doing this into that *huge* space free
Oh BTW:
If you use: xrandr -q
At the command prompt even while the X-Windows display is all messed up at the wrong resolution the line below the line that starts with "Screen 0" should start with the name of your adapter. In my virtual machine that's 'default'. Other common things are 'DVI-0', 'DVI-1'...
One last set of tweaks let's alter grub so that you get a text grub boot menu and the standard text from boot instead of the potentially unreliable graphical splash screen before the GUI login.
You need to go into: /etc/default/
You need to edit: grub
Things to change:
1. Comment out the lines that start with GRUB_HIDDEN by starting them with a hash: #
2. Comment out this line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
3.
Uncomment out this line: GRUB_TERMINAL=console
When you are done save that.
Then execute this command: sudo update-grub
That will rebuild the grub menu and when those changes hit everything up to the login screen will be 80x25 text.
Since you can see the grub menu you can now easily alter the boot options or recover.
The line: GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 is how long the boot menu will display if you want to alter it.
Just make sure to redo the update-grub if you make more changes.
Whatever the outcome of all this please let us all know when you have the chance.
Enjoy your Linux computing. These sorts of weird things are still not quite plug and pray.
Yet another footnote:
I've been asked why /usr/share for the vga.sh script?
/etc/profile.d is more a Bash shell thing. If xrandr is not running, say because X-Windows is not started when Bash executes, the script will do nothing.
In Lubuntu there's a Bash script at /etc/X11/xinit/ called xinitrc but no xinitrc.d directory by default.
I could have suggested patching xinitrc instead of creating a stand alone shell script, but then if you wanted to tinker
with other resolutions changes or testing you'd have to restart X-Windows and with xrandr that is not necessary.
There is nothing stopping someone from creating a script in Python, Perl or Bash to do these changes for you.
There is nothing stopping someone from creating shell scripts like 800x600.sh, 1400x900.sh or 720.sh or 1080.sh.
Of course xrandr supports multiple monitors so you could create scripts like this to switch to different display arrangements on the fly.
Also what happens after you force X-Windows to use 640x480 and someone trys to use the GUI utility to change resolution? Well firstly usually before it commits the change it lets you see the change to see if this actually works. It times out. So if you do this let it time out and hopefully you can see the GUI at the previous resolution of 640x480 again. If not and you accidently accept a new and broken screen resolution in the GUI: CTRL-ALT-F2 or in Oracle VirtualBox 'right CTRL'-F2 to a TTY session then run the /usr/share/vga.sh shell script manually. That will fix your screen immediately. However, if you wanted, you could also force a reboot from that TTY session and, of course, /usr/share/vga.sh will be run anyway during the next startup process. I do not advise you to just force a hard reboot like turning the power off then on. Do a proper shut down or risk a chance meeting with your new best friend 'fsck'.
If you really want to get to use 'modeline' and something similar to xorg.conf on Lubuntu 13.04 then follow the directions at this link:
http://samuelmartin.wordpress.com/20...lubuntu-12-04/
I confirmed those work as well. In case someone is allergic to xrandr
or if for some strange reason Lubuntu is not discovering that your video subsystem actually supports a certain screen resolution or refresh rate. Frankly I think that for a beginner (newb) xrandr is probably much more powerful without the risk that they will break X-Windows in some confusing way (or accidentally turn up the refresh rate on the display until something harmful happens). Keep in mind that several GUI tools might try to edit 10-monitor.conf if they find it or some GUI utilities that you might want to edit xorg.conf, now that you have it, might not work because they were designed for the xorg.conf that was in /etc/X11/ in days gone by. It might still be possible that putting any xorg.conf in the original location and the original format could simply stop X-Windows from starting even if that file is actually correct (this was an issue I've seen before in Ubuntu and I do not plan to test it at this time).
If you do choose to make a 10-monitor.conf for your unusual video subsystem consider downloading the free version of:
http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm
Which in Windows will allow you figure out the correct modeline for your 7" Lilliput 16:10 aspect ratio monitor or your
slightly odd 200lb Sony Trinitron RGB monitor with the BNC inputs and no DDC support.
Have fun! Let me know when this all makes sense to you cause kernel driver coding is next