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gcalsync #3, vmware, xrandr

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First, I wasted a few more hours with my never-ending "sync events form my Nokia S40 phone to Google Calendar" project. The result: it's not a daemon, it checks if the last sync was more than a day ago, if it can ping google.com, and if both, but it can't reach the phone via bluetooth, then it raises a kde4 notification, and it also notifies me when (and how) the sync was done, so that I switch bluetooth off on the phone after the sync. As usual, available here.

Second, I managed to fix two annoying bugs when installing Frugalware under VMware: dhcpcd did not update /etc/resolv.conf in the installer properly, now that I changed from dhcpcd to busybox's udhcpc, it seems to be fine. (And udhcpc still works fine in qemu as well.). The other vmware-related improvement is that the newport xorg driver somehow locked up the whole virtual machine, now it's moved to extra, so xconfig does not freeze the VM on a default install.

Third, today finally I managed to figure out how to enable the external output on my netbook, using the openchrome driver. It's just about a single line in xorg.conf:

Option     "ActiveDevice"               "LCD,CRT"

This won't do more than just cloning the output, but it's far enough for me, who just uses the external output for presentation only.

(There is a binary driver which locks up the whole machine about 5-8 times a day, which has a bit better external video support, but stability is far more important for me, and the openchrome driver _is_ stable.)

Partly related, when I connected the external output to a projector, I had to set the screen resolution to 1024x768, and later back to 1280x800. 5 years earlier you had to edit xorg.conf and restart X to do this, now you can do this with xrandr:

$ xrandr --output default --mode 1024x768

and then to switch back:

$ xrandr --output default --mode 1280x800

OK, enough entries for today. :)

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