Ubuntu 10.04 & docking station part 2

As you might already know, I am using my Ubuntu laptop also with a docking station and external monitor. When I am in the office I dock it in leaving it closed and use only the external monitor (that is by the way a behaviour I can see at several customers also - having no fixed machine any more and dock in the closed notebook).

I had an issue I already described earlier - see part 1: Ubuntu 10.04 with docking station.

Since then I had several issues of having TV1 noticed by accident even when doing nothing or same with my internal laptop screen (LVDS1) when I am working with the external monitor only. The annoying things are three when this happens:

• I can accidently move the mouse out of the window taking a while to bring it back.
• In my compiz I have defined that right-clicking on the border of the screen switches to the next desktop. That does not work any more as the border is not reached when I move the moust to the border of the visible screen.
• Windows may be displayed on the invisible part of the screen so I have them in the task bar but don't see them on screen.

Now I am pretty sure that it is the screensaver that is the culprit here. Disabling the screensaver never brought the issue back again. Only drawback: When I leave the machine I manually have to lock the screen pressing CTRL+ALT+L.

Same thing of second monitor accidently recognized happened in about 75 % when starting TeamViewer (which is my favorite remote assistence tool). Today I finally filed a bug and guess what - problem already solved (thanks to Daniel Stiefelmaier at TeamViewer support)!

Dear Martin,

I found a possible solution to that. Please open a console and run
WINEDEBUG=xrandr teamviewer&
Then take a look at the log:
cat ~/.teamviewer/6/winelog
You should see some xrandr lines. Then run
/opt/teamviewer/teamviewer/6/bin/.regedit
Create the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\X11 Driver
there, create a String "UseXRandR" and set its value to "N".
Close the registry, and repeat the other commands:
WINEDEBUG=xrandr teamviewer&
cat ~/.teamviewer/6/winelog
Now, there should be no xrandr lines.

Yeah, that did it!

Related posts: Ubuntu 10.04 with docking station (part 1), Ubuntu 10.04 experiences, OpenOffice and LibreOffice starts slow.

The community

In the last months I have been a participant in several communities, forums and the like. And I also have left some. I want to share some experiences:

1. The community behind a software product (or any other thing) is a crucial factor for success of the product and motivation of the members.
   
2. The spirit of the community is important. For the Ubuntu community (to give an example) there is the code of conduct to which most members admit to. It is the philosophy behind the group, a big picture that holds the people together.
   
3. Nobody knows everything. With the contribution and help of each single community member the community gets smart.
   
4. In good communities, members focus on the matter, not on blaming other persons or other products - their main target is to solve problems. Of course I like that. :-)
   
5. In good communities it is easy to get involved and it is easy to be integrated (if you handle the members with respect).
   
6. In good communities you are respected and your opinion is valued.
   
7. There is a mass contribution effect in larger communities: While a company could hardly finance project teams with more than 30 or so members, in a big community there are many people adding value - even if it is a small contribution for each person, those contributions some up to enormous results.

There are two communities that I am proud to be in - the Ubuntu community and the Java community. I do not only participate in forum posts etc - I am also attending local events. Those events are usually very interesting from the technical point of view and also from the way community members deal with each other.

Don't forget, that no product and no system can be successful without the people behind it! - It's all about the people!

Related posts: The Open Source idea, The Open Source movement, Paying for free and Open Source, User lock down, Going Linux, The future of Java, Popular Ubuntu desktop myths.