Higher Resolution in Fedora 11 with proprietary NVidia Drivers

Ugh... I have been screwing around with this since the beginning of time... Or at least since I installed Fedora for the so-manieth time. Finally though I found out what I had to do.

Following this guide, I was able to easily and correctly install the drivers. I used to build them myself, but that got me worse results then anything.
To sum up, though:

# switch to super user (root)
su
# install rpmfusion repository
rpm -Uvh \
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm \
http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
# install the driver (I have an i686 pc, you might need a different architecture, like 64_32 or something similar)
yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i586
# reboot to make changed take effect
reboot

This only got me a 1024x768 resolution, though... Which pissed me off...

I started looking around the internet for a way to fix it in the xorg.conf itself, which I'd done on Fedora 9 before, but didn't remember how (the reason I'm writing this right now), but didn't actually find what I was looking for.

In the end I found 2 supposed fixes, one added a Modes option to the "Display" section of the "Screen" section, and another was to add a DisplaySize option to the "Monitor" section.
Well, I found out I needed both, so I added DisplaySize 1280 1024 to the "Monitor" section and Modes "1280x1024" to the "Display" subsection of the "Screen" section.

Now it's working again, running at 1280x1024 with screen compositing (so I can run gnome-do with docky theme, which I'm trying out for a while).

A simple gnome-blog test

I've been looking for some way to post blog entries from my desktop for a while now, I've come across Drivel (which crashes when I try to log in to blogger with it), can't find a Bleezer package at work (just checked it, first time I heard of it today) and no other gtk/gnome client seems appealing.

Let's see what this gnome-blog app does.

Not much so far, bold or italic seems the be the only options available to me at the moment, let's see about HTML:

to install gnome-blog in Ubuntu 9.04 use

sudo apt-get install gnome-blog

and the rest should then be self-evident.

Removing a service manually in Windows Server 2008

I was writing a test Windows Service and accidentally removed it through the Programs and Features dialog, which removes the files, but doesn't actually remove the service from the service list. So when I tried to install the 2nd version of this test service it was complaining that it already existed.

I looked around a little and found that I could delete the Service from the registry in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\[Your service]. I deleted the key (the little folder thingy) and it did show some change, but my service was still there and the newer version still wouldn't install.

After a little more looking around I found out that to fix it I could use sc delete [YourService] to fix it. And it did!

Next time, though, I really should use the installer I used to install it to remove it...

Code::Blocks "process terminted with signal 255 (0 minutes, 0 seconds)"

Yesterday after I came home from work I thought I'd try working on a project I've been working on this past weekend.
I was away from home this weekend, so all the work I'd done had been on another computer, in a virtual Ubuntu installation, so I hadn't yet tried it at home.

Trying to build it went fine. Running it from a terminal went fine. Even compiling and running on another Ubuntu installation (my work laptop, non-virtual) went fine, but Code::Blocks reported to me that whenever I tried running my application on my Fedora 11 home installation that it terminated with signal 255.
I couldn't find what was wrong, I knew the application worked since I tested it in another terminal window and if I debugged it it'd go great up to the point where it met with a cin or cout.
Being tired from a really long day (getting up at 5:00am, get on train at 6:25am, get off train at 8:30am and at work 8:50am), I gave up fairly quickly.

This morning though the itch got worse and I just had to investigate further.
After about a minute of looking around I found someone at the Ubuntu Forums asking about the exact same thing and it turns out that the problem was that xterm wasn't installed. So a simple

su -c "yum install xterm"

was enough to fix the problem.

Now I can start developing my application again!

Low Resolution in Fedora 11 with Nvidia drivers

Finally, after hours of looking and working I have finally again found how to set the resolution to what I need (have 1280x1024, had 640x480). I've had trouble with my resolution in Fedora before, but I don't ever remember it being this much of a pain, but then again I don't remember much about it at all, wish I'd remembered how I fixed it.
So to help me remember and perhaps even help someone else work around it, here's how I finally got it working.

I'm now using the Nouveau driver with a generic LCD Panel 1280x1024. I tried setting this in

system-config-display

many times, but it just wouldn't accept my monitor.
So in the end I looked at

system-config-display --help

and noticed

--reconfigure

, which doesn't base the new configuration file on an old one.
Using this option and setting my driver to nv and my monitor to generic 1280x1024 and then

su -c "init 3"
[log in]
su -c "init 5"

got me the right resolution again. However the nv driver is just a little too basic, so I thought I'd try the same thing with the proprietary driver, so I did everything exactly as before, only I used the driver nvidia instead of nv.
Now again X wouldn't start at all, so I ran

livna-config-display -a

to get it to my old low-res configuration, and then I tried it a third time, this time using the nouveau driver (which I've heard is better then nv) and that worked!

I know that supposedly you're also able to use xorg.conf to set certain Modes values for your display, but this didn't do anything for me at all in fedora, did help me in ubuntu, but then there I got the weirdest resolution.

finally I can look at a normal screen again.

Now I should get going to work, I'm gonna be really late (this really bugged me!)