ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 for Ubuntu 9.04?

I am looking to make this card work with Ubuntu 9.04 and could not find any relevant articles with steps to make this work. ATI does seem to have a driver for this card, but it freezes up my box (32 bit) :(

I will update this article if I can figure this out.

Enabling SMART for HDD Health

http://www.the-little-things.net/blog/?p=35

Combine Multiple PDFs into one in Linux

Don't you love the way Linux has evolved. I needed to combine few pdf files into one and was looking for a pdfedit kind of thing with capabilities for combining multiple pdfs and this guy from Ubuntu Geek provides the steps clearly.

sudo apt-get install gs pdftk

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE= -dBATCH ...

Simple, isn't it!

Playing mp3 from command line using MPlayer

I have been looking for a command line tool to play my music on the remotely connected machine (yeah it's my mythtv box and I usually just ssh to it and have my speakers connected to it).

This is how you can do it if you are looking to play all the mp3 files in that directory:

> mplayer dir *.mp3

Simple as that!

Also, you could use the "-loop 0" to repeat the song/playlist forever :)

> mplayer -loop 0 filename.mp3

Of course you may want to wait for my new project MuTruss to do more exhaustive search and then create your own playlists. But till it comes live, you have to just use plain old wild cards :)

Have fun!

Dual monitors on Ubuntu 8.10

I specified the Ubuntu version because it may change your experience. And for the record, I love this new version so far.

From command line:

1. First backup your xorg.conf file

# sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.back

2. Install Nvidia-glx using the following command 

# sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx

3. Now edit the xorg.conf file as follows

Under the module section, replace “nv” with “glx”. Under the device heading, make sure that Driver says “nvidia”. Under the screen section, add the following line:

Option “RenderAccel” “true”.

4. Save the file and Reload X by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

5. If that works fine, open and edit the xorg.conf file, go to the section "Screen" and add the following

# Turn on NVidia’s TwinView
Option “TwinView”
# Set the resolution for both monitors
Option “MetaModes” “1280×1024 1280×1024″

6. Save the file and Reload X by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

7. If the orientation is off, add the following under the screen settings

Option “TwinViewOrientation” “LeftOf”

Another way to do this is using: gksudo nvidia-settings

Using the GUI tool:

This has to be the easiest task in the world! Go to Settings -> nvidia settings and do the stuff old fashioned "Windows" way :)