From the totally asinine department: From blogs I have read today, in the name of ‘freedom of speech’, you cannot tell someone to shut up. Why is ’shut up’ not covered under free speech? You should be free to say ‘hey, shut up’, and they are free to say ‘hey, no.’ … have we hit some sort of idiocracy realized?

Looking for help from anyone here for good solutions that are probably obvious but that I can’t seem to nail down.

The problem: I need to keep track of different types of devices in a database. The issue is that devices have some attributes that are common (ie asset tag) and others that are not (only certain devices have ip addresses). I don’t want to make a table called ‘device’ in the database that has 3000 fields to it (for every possible attribute a device might have), as having all those empty fields seems like a bad design. I thought about making a table called ‘device_type’, and maybe device_type has a field called ‘attributes’ that lists the fields for X type of device, but I am not sure how to go about doing that.

Also making a table for each type of device is not an easily manageable solution, and once I implement the schema I cannot change it later easily (SOX compliance).

The solution: Please share

If you have an Intel HD audio card in your Dell D630 in Gutsy, you probably don’t have sound.


sudo apt-get install module-assistant
sudo m-a update
sudo m-a prepare
sudo m-a a-i alsa


Now you do. Reference: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=573330&page=1
Related bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/39770

Dell d620 / d630 3D dual head configuration
So at work we have laptops with docking stations. Our native laptop screen res is 1440×900, and our secondary monitors (hooked up to the docking station) are 1280×1024. To make this work, first we need to edit xorg.conf, and add the following under the “Screen” Section:


SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1440x900" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600"
Virtual 2048 2048
EndSubSection


Now the key is, we will be using xrandr, but the intel chips in our laptops only support 2048×2048 (this restriction is for 3d desktops only, ie compiz / aiglx) maximum size. So we can’t have a monitor left of, or right of, our display, because 1280 + 1440 = 2720 which is bigger than 2048. However, if we configured the second head to be Above the first, we can fit it in (900 + 1024 = 1924 which is less than 2048).

So first we investigate our displays:

# xrandr -q


After that, we see there are 2 monitors, VGA and LVDS. So the external monitor is at the wrong resolution, so I fix that first:

# xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280x1024


Now they are currently in clone mode, which is no good. I want to use both screens. So I type:

# xrandr --output VGA --above LVDS


Then bam, we have dual head. That works with compiz. Yay. Previously, in Feisty, I used the ‘MergedFB’ solution which appears to have been depreciated. For references:
http://wiki.debian.org/XStrikeForce/HowToRandR12
http://www.intellinuxgraphics.org/dualhead.html