the cosmotron » Announcement

Basic Emacs Tutorial

Ryan Lewis — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:43:38 +0000

In my last post, I wrote about how I had to write a guide to using a piece of software for a class. Well, I had to do another one, but this time it was individually rather than in a group.

So, I wrote a guide on how to do some basic tasks in emacs.

Let me know of any mistakes/improvements that you can think of in the comments!

P.S. I’m pretty fond of the mock terminal that I made with CSS.

Samsung LN32A450, nVidia Drivers, and Ubuntu

Ryan Lewis — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:43:08 +0000

I just recently purchased a Samsung LN32A450 television and wanted to use it as a monitor. I figured that it shouldn’t be too hard, just plug in my computer to it’s VGA port and then change the resolution.

But, when are new things ever easy?

To make a long story short, I had to generate a custom modeline for X to be able to use the TV’s native resolution, 1360×768. I read to use the command cvt 1360 768 60.015Hz, but the returned modeline resulted in a “Mode Not Supported” error from the TV. Instead, I had to use a Windows program called PowerStrip to grab the custom timings that actually worked. Though, the only reason they worked was by luck because Windows didn’t properly detect the monitor either, so I used PowerStrip to add a custom resolution to my registry which was preset with working timings.

Anyway, PowerStrip was nice enough to generate an xorg.conf modeline for me and had to edit the following in my file (this is assuming that you already have the proprietary nVidia drivers already working):

…

Section "Monitor"
    …
    Modeline "1360x768" 85.500 1360 1440 1552 1792 768 771 777 795 +hsync +vsync
EndSection

…

Section "Screen"
    …
    SubSection "Display"
        Depth  24
        Virtual 1360 768
        Modes "1360x768"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

…

Note: any ellipses (…) in the above are just cutting out parts that were not changed in my file.

UPDATE: I figured that I would make a note that I recently tried getting a new computer to work with this television and didn’t have as much luck. The new computer was using an ATI Radeon 4850 rather than the nVidia card that I got working previously. Ultimately, I couldn’t get the VGA out to work and had to switch to using an HDMI connection. After I did that, Ubuntu 8.10 (the same OS that I was using previously) automatically detected the native resolution of this TV. Therefore, I recommend using HDMI over VGA to get this TV to work in Linux.

Public Service Announcement

Ryan Lewis — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 22:22:46 +0000

Cheating in the Arcade:
Users will be banned if I get an e-mail like this from my forum:

Arcade Cheat @ [ NAME : *withheld* ] -- [ IP# : *withheld* ] -- [USERNAME : Ãœbernoob] [GAME : save_balls]

the cosmotron’s redesign

Ryan Lewis — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 20:55:28 +0000

Recently I have grown very bored of my old theme so I have decided to start redesigning a majority of the site to accomidate this new theme. I suppose that the cosmotron forum and project goto will be changed and that will take a while; therefore I have no idea when everything will be complete.

Note: All of the old files that were originally located directly off of the index (i.e. content.php), are now located in the old/ directory (so, now that link is located at old/content.php), but all folders have remained in the same place (i.e. TEST/test5.php is still located exactly there).

cosi blog

Ryan Lewis — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 20:51:48 +0000

Just announcing the opening of the cosi blog. It’s mostly just for technical information regarding the Clarkson Open Source Institute.