xrandr in Ubuntu 9.10

I’ve been using an external monitor with my laptop at work for quite a while. Ubuntu 9.04 did this like I expected:
xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280x1024 --above LVDS
will use my external monitor as an extension and put it virtually on top of my laptop screen, with the panel on top of the virtual desktop. After upgrading to 9.10, this doesn’t work anymore. The first thing is to change VGA and LVDS to VGA1 and LVDS1, but after that, the location of my top panel changed:

The old setting gives me easy access to my top panel, now if I want to use that panel I need to move my pointer to a very thin band between two physical monitors, which is extremely difficult to do. How stupid is that?

x-hacker

> /home/john/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/planet/feedparser.py(2699)parse()
-> result['feed'] = feedparser.feeddata
(Pdb) p result
{'feed': {}, 'status': 200, 'updated': time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=18, tm_min=20, tm_sec=46, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=150, tm_isdst=0), 'version': None, 'encoding': 'UTF-8', 'bozo': 0, 'headers': {'x-nananana': 'Batcache', 'transfer-encoding': 'chunked', 'content-encoding': 'gzip', 'vary': 'Cookie, Accept-Encoding', 'server': 'nginx', 'last-modified': 'Sat, 30 May 2009 18:20:46 +0000', 'connection': 'close', 'etag': '"6d6a931c57ea74fb68476ac28bb7a24c"', 'cache-control': 'max-age=300, must-revalidate', 'date': 'Sat, 30 May 2009 18:20:46 GMT', 'x-hacker': "If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.", 'content-type': 'text/xml; charset=UTF-8', 'x-pingback': 'http://asleepfromday.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php'}, 'etag': '"6d6a931c57ea74fb68476ac28bb7a24c"', 'href': 'http://asleepfromday.wordpress.com/category/0xlab/feed/', 'entries': []}

If you’re reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.
Hey, I was just trying to fix planet feed reader…

Slashdotted.

So now the news is in the open. After Harald mentioned the recent status of Openmoko, Sean talked at openexpo to explain the whole thing.

In my opinion, Sean was more honest then I expected, and I admire that. It’s hard to admit so many mistakes as the CEO of a company.

Anyway, leave the past in the past. Life still needs to move on. I still got my gta02 (freerunner), and it’s still an interesting device that has all kinds of possibilities. What’s missing is just the right software. I still haven’t decided where to put my energy into, whether it should be freesmartphone based or Android. As a FOSS developer, it seems I should really support freesmartphone, but since my next job will most likely be related to Android and my time/energy is limited, maybe I will start with android.

I didn’t put this into Openmoko category by purpose so it won’t show up on planet.openmoko.org.