name of display: :0.0
X Error of failed request: BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 156 (GLX)
Minor opcode of failed request: 19 (X_GLXQueryServerString)
Serial number of failed request: 10
Current serial number in output stream: 10

The exact numbers varied depending on the application, but the results were all the same: failure. A Google search or two later, and I discovered that the best solution was to switch to the proprietary FGLRX drivers. I wasn’t eager to do that both out of philosophy and the time it took to get dual monitors to properly work with the radeon drivers, but I gritted my teeth and made the switch. Ubuntu loaded in cloned mode just fine and Blender worked, so the next step was getting the dual-screen setup to work properly (extend across both screens, called “Big Desktop” by ATI in some cases).

After a few attempts, I was able to get the login screen to show up as I wanted it, but the display would revert to cloned mode after logging in. I tried a bunch of xorg.conf tweaks that ended up being unnecessary because I found that I had to again use a virtual resolution. This time I set it via System > Preferences > Screen Resolution, changing from 1680×1050 to 3360×1050. It seems to be working, but I may need to do a bit more tweaking since the 2D draw rate seems a tad slow. Then again, it’s late, and I’m tired, so I may be imagining it. We’ll see tomorrow. My new xorg.conf file looks like this:

#ATI Radeon 9800 Pro dual-head (extended) using fglrx drivers

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "default"
	Screen      0  "screen0" 0 0
	Option		"Dualhead" "true"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "radeon0"
	Driver      "fglrx"
	Option	    "DesktopSetup" "horizontal"
	BusID       "PCI:3:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"radeon1"
	Driver		"fglrx"
	BusID		"PCI:3:0:0"
	Screen		1
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier  "monitor0"
	Option      "DPMS"
	HorizSync   24-82
	VertRefresh 50-75
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier  "monitor1"
	Option      "DPMS"
	HorizSync   24-82
	VertRefresh 50-75
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"screen0"
	Device		"radeon0"
	Monitor		"monitor0"
	DefaultDepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport 0 0
		Modes	"1680x1050"
		Depth	24
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"screen1"
	Device		"radeon1"
	Monitor		"monitor1"
	DefaultDepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
		Modes	"1680x1050"
		Depth	24
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
	Mode 0666
EndSection

One of the things that I have found hardest to explain is Linux. Assuming you can even get the concept of an operating system across, you still have to deal with explaining how it is different from Windows (if you’re lucky, the person will have had some exposure to OS X or another operating system but don’t count on it).

Randomly, I came up with the thought of comparing it to the difference between driving a car with a manual transmission and driving an automatic, the manual being Linux and the automatic being Windows. It’s a little harder to learn to drive a stick shift, but the benefit pays off in most cases. You have more control and power, better fuel economy (perhaps comparable to RAM use), and a stick shift is even cheaper. So, you could pay the extra for an automatic, hope that everything works out for you, and accept the limitations, or you can save some money but spend more time learning upfront for all the benefits.

Then the only challenge left is getting rid of the “that’s for computer geeks only” preconception. But manual transmissions aren’t just for racecar drivers….

I had previously followed a great tablet tutorial and everything worked perfectly. After the upgrade, the tablet essentially quit working. Apparently, the problem was related to changes in XOrg 7.3. I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ll sum up what I learned by reading through this huge thread about it. This assumes you followed the original tutorial.

Replace the old driver with the new one (precompiled for Hardy i386 or by compiling your own from source). Make sure that you remove both copies of the old one if you put it in two locations (e.g., “/usr/lib/xorg/modules/” and the “input” directory there); just put a copy of the new one in the input directory.

sudo rm /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/wizardpen_drv.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/xorg/modules/wizardpen_drv.so
wget http://specificcrap.arbitrarycrap.com/wizardpen_drv.so
sudo mv wizardpen_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/

Make a backup of your current xorg.conf:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

Open the xorg.conf for editing in your favorite editor (use gedit if you don’t know vim):

sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf
#or
gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Make sure that the input device for your tablet has the mode set to “absolute” and comment out (by adding “#” to the front of the line) any of the CorePointer or SendCoreEvents options. Your ServerLayout section should enable the tablet using the identifier from the tablet’s InputDevice section and set “SendCoreEvents,” e.g.:

InputDevice "WizardPen Tablet" "SendCoreEvents"

Save the changes and close the file. Now you can restart X (ctrl+alt+backspace). It works… hopefully. Be sure to configure GIMP and any other apps that you’ll need the tablet for. You may encounter some problems….

If tablet tip causes “middle” clicking: Make sure you do not have the “Emulate3Buttons” option enabled anywhere in your xorg.conf.

If you can’t “drag” in GIMP: Make sure your mouse’s InputDevice section sets the device to a specific mouse and not the generic mice input (e.g., it could be “/dev/input/mouse2″ rather than “/dev/input/mice”). If you’re unsure which mouse it should be, you can start with mouse0 and work your way up. Restart X after each change. For me, 0 disabled the mouse and 1 prevented me from logging in. Use ctrl+alt+f1 to switch to a terminal and change the device if you run into trouble and ctrl+alt+f9 to switch back to X (be sure to restart it after making changes).

Other problem: Try running cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep Tablet to see if you have any errors.

Here are the relevant chunks of my xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier    "Configured Mouse"
    Driver        "mouse"
    Option        "CorePointer"
    Option        "Device"        "/dev/input/mouse2"
    Option        "Protocol"      "ImPS/2"
    Option        "ZAxisMapping"  "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier    "WizardPen Tablet"
    Driver        "wizardpen"
    Option        "Mode"        "absolute"
    Option        "Device"      "/dev/tablet-event"
    Option        "TopX"        "826"
    Option        "TopY"        "2626"
    Option        "BottomX"     "32747"
    Option        "BottomY"     "32762"
    Option        "MaxX"        "32747"
    Option        "MaxY"        "32762"
    Option        "TopZ"        "35"
    Option        "BottomZ"     "511"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier    "Default Layout"
    Screen        "screen0"
    InputDevice   "Generic Keyboard"
    InputDevice   "Configured Mouse"
    InputDevice   "WizardPen Tablet" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

I tried the easy method of “BigDesktop” and came up with a core dump. Google revealed nothing so I moved onto the “MergedFB” method. Long story short, I had no success after 2-3 hours. Essentially, it took that amount of time before I stopped trusting online sources and started looking at the logs. MergedFB is no longer supported… I moved on to “XRandR.” And had immediate success… sort of.

Within five minutes, I had dual screens working as I wanted, like one large, virtual desktop. making it easy to move windows back and forth across the two screens. Just one problem: It was slow! It was painfully slow! 486 slow! If I switched workspaces, it could take 15-30 seconds to repaint the desktop. When I really got going, the computer would not keep up with my typing and when the letters eventually came out, they were scrambled.

Fortunately, this is another case of the right solution being fairly simple. In the xorg.conf file, I had to change “AccelMethod” from “EXA” to “XAA” (learned from this link). I restarted X and everything is fast again. Ah, wonderful high resolution… *drools*

Simply run gstreamer-properties from a terminal and switch to the video tab. Change the top option (the video output plugin) to custom. Change the pipeline to:

ffmpegcolorspace ! video/x-raw-yuv,format=(fourcc)YV12 ! xvimagesink

and test it out. That solved the problem for me (after adjusting the hue back to normal). Blues are blue. Reds are red. Greens are green. What a concept!

After making the complete jump to Linux a year and some-odd months ago, I looked for a QuickSilver application for Gnome (the GUI I use in Linux). Katapult is a pretty good version for KDE (another GUI choice in Linux), but I kept looking. Eventually, I tried several and gave up. ALT+F2 could bring up the Run Application box that was like the ugly step-brother of an application launcher, so I stuck with that. Recently, I was looking for something else and came across a fairly new (I believe it was first released in September of this year) development called Gnome Do.

I tried to find more information out about this (why didn’t I hear about it sooner?) and I came across this blog post that is a nice intro to the program. That post is probably better than what I would create, so check it out. Also keep in mind that Gnome Do is new, so it doesn’t have the ridiculous (in an awesome way) feature-set that QuickSilver does, but, if we start spreading the word about Gnome Do, I’m sure the features will start rolling in.

Previous commands
The majority of you probably know about pressing up to go to previous commands or pressing tab to auto-complete filenames and the like. You probably even know about (but perhaps rarely use) the history command. One additional feature you might not know about is the ability to quickly and easily search for a previous command. Try CTRL+R and then start typing the first few letters of a command you previously ran.

Moving around
Obviously, you can use the arrow keys to move around on the command line, but there are several other shortcuts:

• CTRL+A = move cursor to beginning of line
• CTRL+E = move cursor to end of line
• CTRL+U = deletes everything before the cursor
• CTRL+K = deletes everything after the cursor
• CTRL+W = deletes the “word” before the cursor (all text up to the previous space)
• CTRL+Y = paste previously deleted text (similar to undo and can be repeated)
• CTRL+I = similar to tab but for whatever text your cursor is on
• CTRL+L = similar to the “clear” command

Background/Foreground processes
You can press CTRL+Z to put the current process into the background and enter fg to return that process to the foreground. You can also start a process in the background by appending an ampersand (‘&’) to your command (e.g., “cp backup/bigfile.gz . &”). You can view the current processes with the jobs command, and you can selectively bring them to the foreground by using fg X where ‘X’ is equal to the job number (e.g., “fg 3″).

Miscellaneous
If you haven’t started using Vim, you’re missing out. The learning curve is a little steep, but vimtutor can help. You may need to install the tutor (“sudo apt-get install vim-runtime” sets it up in Ubuntu), but it is well worth the little effort. What some users don’t realize is that you can very effectively use the shell through Vim. For instance, you can highlight text in Visual Mode, then run :!sort (“:!” is how you start any single shell command). That passes the highlight text to the Linux program, “sort,” and inserts the results. You can also go entirely into a shell with :sh so that you can accomplish more complex tasks (of course you can always CTRL+Z as well). Obviously, there is a lot more that Vim can do, but I thought this little bit was most appropriate for a post about the Linux command line.

I commonly search for strings in multiple files (particularly when editing PHP). I learned to do that using find . -name “*.php” -exec grep -il “string” {} \;, where “string” is the string you wish to search for. The “-il” keeps it case insensitive and simply lists the files the string occurs in. With Linux there are many different ways to do anything, so find what works best for you.

Sometimes you need to have a command run even if you log out of the server. For this, you use “nohup” plus the normal command. For example, you might type nohup ./autorun & to start a program in the background and allow it to continue running when you disconnect.

There are countless other tips out there. I suggest that any time you think, “It would be really helpful if I could do X,” stop what you are doing and find out how to do it. Sure, you can press the left arrow repeatedly to get to the start of a command line, but learning CTRL+A will save you time. Just like when learning Vim, if you force yourself to do things “the Vim way,” you will be much better off than if you try to use the arrow keys like in another program, so force yourself to do things “the Linux way,” and double your productivity (or at least impress a few friends).

If you have any additional tips, feel free to post them.

Every so often, one quickly finds the one-line Linux answer after just a few minutes of searching!

Windows
First, I'll cover the Windows experience. I plugged in the device and installed all of the software that came on the CD (I don't really care if my Windows install becomes more bloated, it's the first time I've booted into it in about a month), so I could have the "full experience." The tablet comes with a trial of Corel Painter 8 (which is apparently old, because their site has the X version), so I was curious how well this software worked. The kindergarten-style painting I did was a 15-minute job without knowing how to do anything in the program. I am rather impressed. The pressure sensitivity controls the opacity of most of the tools (you can use brushes with different types of paints, pencils, felt-tip pens, etc.), which is more fun than you would think. It's better than most video games I've played lately... Comparatively, Photoshop adjusts the size of the brush based on pressure, which is decidedly less useful. It wouldn't surprise me if there was an option to change this, but I am getting away from commercial software and this was just a quick test.

Ubuntu Feisty (Linux)
I actually tested the tablet in Ubuntu first, but had some issues. It "worked" just by being plugged in, but it didn't work well. The tablet is supposed to be a representation of your screen, so pressing on the center of the tablet would be like clicking on the center of the screen. Unfortunately the tablet and screen did not agree on any positions and continually changed (one minute the right edge would be the right edge, the next minute it would be the center). I looked around and found a Linux driver that sounded promising. I tried to follow the install instructions and it broke X. After a lot of fussing around, I was able to fix my mistakes and I came across a more accurate guide. After some more work, I finally had some success: the tablet was properly working! It correctly mapped the tablet to the screen (there is even a calibration tool for this).

After some quick tests, it is working well in both Inkscape and Xara Xtreme, but pressure sensitivity does not appear to function. I'll have to play around with it some more, because that's a very important feature when creating detailed work, but the lack of pressure sensitivity shouldn't affect my work on comics too much. We'll see...

Other Notes
I'm sure I'll post more about this later, but my initial impression is good. One thing to consider is that some reviews said there were problems with this tablet (and many others) on dual monitors. I haven't tested it out with the other monitor attached, so I can't confirm that, but it wouldn't surprise me. I haven't been affected by using the "normal ratio" tablet with my widescreen laptop, but dual monitors poses a bigger problem with that and other issues. With the Linux driver, you could adjust the calibration (this may be possible in the Windows driver too, I didn't try), but it would probably still be a bit awkward.