Enable ctrl+alt+backspace in Jaunty

I don’t know why it’s disabled by default and I use it quite often because I’m always playing around and installing things so it’s incredibly irritating to me that you can’t just press ctrl+alt+backspace to restart x.

To enable it you can do it through editing the xorg.conf file:

1. Open a terminal and type sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

2. Add this section to the file:
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "false"
EndSection

3. Save and restart.

4. Yay.

Free utilities for tweaking Windows part 2

A few other utilities I got from the PC World article linked to in the previous post are RocketDock and Ultimate Windows Tweaker.

RocketDock

Being the multi-tasker that I am, I found this little tool to be pretty handy along with VirtuaWin. I have a few programs in my quicklaunch bar, but I don’t want to overload that so I use RocketDock for a few more shortcuts that I access on a regular basis. I have it set to auto-hide so that it isn’t always a distraction – it’s only there when I need it.

There are different skins for it that you can use and you can go to their website to download icons, more skins, and docklets. I can’t think of a complaint about this, I’ve been pretty happy with it.

Ultimate Windows Tweaker
This is actually an easier way to adjust things that I posted about in my trimming Vista’s fat post. The three sections of the tweaker that I like the most are the personalization, system performance, and additional options.

In the personalization section you can choose which items will show in the start menu, remove some or all icons that show in the taskbar, change the window padding, along with some other features.

The changes I made in the system performance section have made the biggest difference. In there you can change the time the computer waits for services to shut down, the time it waits to end non-responsive applications, and waiting time to kill applications timeout during shutdown. My computer shuts down MUCH faster now.

Finally, the additional options section just has a few things in there that I changed. You can add some useful options to the context menus for files and folders and drives. Also, being able to remove the arrows from creating shortcuts was nice. Definitely not anything that improved performance, but useful changes for me.

There are a lot of other things you can edit with this. I only highlighted the sections that were the most useful to me.

Free utilities for tweaking Windows Part 1

I decided to come up with a list a programs I use to maintain my Vista laptop.  I got some from this PC World article and others I found on download.com.  Instead of making one massive post I’ll break it up into two or three.

First on my list and the most exciting to me is a cool thing called VirtuaWin.

I use Linux all the time at work, the only time I use Windows is when I have to do some maintenance for those in the office who use it. I fell completely in love with the multiple workspaces that you can use in Linux. I have a separate space for email, another for my browser, and another for whatever else I happen to be playing with or troubleshooting. Having multiple workspaces is absolutely necessary for my job, I do way too many things at once to not need that feature.

I got so excited when I heard from a friend of mine about a nifty little program that allows you to have multiple workspaces in Windows. I then read an article somewhere, that I can’t seem to find the link for, about it so I thought I’d give it a try. I was a little worried about how much memory it would suck up and whether it would slow down the start-up and shutdown process of my laptop. I noticed a bit of a slowdown but the benefits outweigh it since it really doesn’t make that much of a difference.

You can have up to 9 workspaces, which I find to be way too many. I have 4 set up but probably only use 3 of them on a regular basis. By default, the hotkey to move between desktops is the windows key + arrow key. There’s an option to make it so that when you’re mouse is against the edge of your screen it switches to another workspace, but I found that to be incredibly irritating so I stuck to the hotkey.  Another thing I like about it is that I finally have a use for the ability of the wheel on my mouse to click.  If I click on the title bar of a window with the mouse wheel it gives the option to move that application to one of the other workspaces – I use that all the time.  You can also add modules from their website to add features, although there aren’t very many.  That’s another plus, they didn’t add a bunch of useless features to the basic installation, if you want extras you can install them yourself.  This is compatible with Vista all the way back to Win98, so if you have a Windows machine this will work for you.

I need a nap, more to come.

Vista automatic login

I found directions online for how to set automatic login in Vista on machine that’s also on a domain. Normally to set it to automatically log in you can just check a box in the advanced user account settings window. But that box isn’t there if your machine is on a domain. In order to get it to work you have to edit the registry.  This is more so for my own notes so I don’t have to risk losing this in my bookmarks or something.  But maybe it’ll help others.

Doing anything in the registry can really screw up your computer if you don’t know what you’re doing.  Do this at your own risk.

Automatic login on a non-domained machine:

1. Type netplwiz into the search bar to open the settings box for user accounts.
2. Highlight the username you want to automatically log in and uncheck the box, users must enter a user name and password to use this computer.
   
3. Type in your user name and password to verify and close everything.

Automatic login on a domained machine:

1. Start menu -> type regedit in the search bar and hit enter.
2. Go to this registry key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
   
3. Double-click the DefaultUserName entry, type the user name to log on with, and then click OK.If DefaultUserName registry value name is not found, create the new String Value (REG_SZ) with value name as DefaultUserName.
4. Double-click the DefaultPassword entry, type the password for the user account under the value data box, and then click OK.If there is no DefaultPassword value, create a new String Value subkey (REG_SZ) with DefaultPassword as the value name.

   Note that if no DefaultPassword string is specified, Windows automatically changes the value of the AutoAdminLogon registry key from 1 (true) to 0 (false) to turn off the AutoAdminLogon feature.

5. In Windows Vista, DefaultDomainName has to be specified as well, else Windows will prompt of invalid user name with user name displayed as .\username. To do so, double click on DefaultDomainName, and specify the domain name of the user account. If it’s local user, specify local host name.If the DefaultDomainName does not exist, create a new String Value (REG_SZ) registry key with value name as DefaultDomainName.
6. Double-click the AutoAdminLogon entry, type 1 in the Value Data box, and then click OK. If there is no AutoAdminLogon entry, create a new String Value entry (REG_SZ) with AutoAdminLogon as the value name.
7. If it exists, delete the AutoLogonCount key.
8. Quit Registry Editor.
9. Restart your computer.

Source:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/06/15/how-to-enable-auto-logon-to-windows-xp-and-vista-joined-as-domain-member/

ATI big desktop in Jaunty Jackalope

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the fight to get dual screens working properly with the ATI graphics card wasn’t as difficult as it has been in the past. The restricted hardware manager didn’t lock up on me after activating the ATI driver, but I still couldn’t get big desktop to work.

When trying to set up big desktop through aticonfig in the terminal I got Error: Options, e.g. --dtop and --desktop-setup, are not supported when RandR 1.2 is enabled. I had no idea what that meant but I did a quick google search and found that someone had reported a bug with the same problem. Another person posted something that fixed it for me.

1. Login to a tty (ctrl+alt F1) and type sudo killall gdm.
2. Type sudo nano (or gedit, whichever you prefer) /etc/ati/amdpcsdb to edit the file.
   a) Go to the [AMDPCSROOT/SYSTEM/DDX] section and add EnableRandR12=Sfalse.
3. Type this into a terminal, sudo nano (or gedit) /etc/X11/xorg.conf, to open the xorg.conf file.
4. Under the “Device” section add these options on separate lines: Option "EnableRandR12" "false" and Option "DesktopSetup" "horizontal".
5. Now just restart your computer and it should be good to go.

xorg.conf file:

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “aticonfig Layout”
Screen 0 “Default Screen” 0 0
EndSection

Section “Files”
EndSection

Section “Module”
Load “glx”
EndSection

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Configured Monitor”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
Driver “fglrx”
Option “EnableRandR12″ “false”
Option “DesktopSetup” “horizontal”
BusID “PCI:1:0:0″
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Device “Configured Video Device”
Monitor “Configured Monitor”
DefaultDepth 24
EndSection