External Monitor as Primary/Default Display

I recently installed Lucid Lynx on my Dell Inspiron 9400. One niggling annoyance was that the Dell's LCD screen was the primary display, whereas I wanted my external monitor (BenQ T2200D via DVI) to be the primary display.

Ultimately, the solution was simple:

1. run the NVidia X Server Settings tool (gksudo nvidia-settings)
2. in the X Server Display Configuration I made sure the Dell's display (Seiko) was disabled
3. when saving to the X Configuration file, i.e. /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I chose not to merge with existing file
4. restart X
   

X unstable running Lucid on a Compaq Evo 510s

I recently upgraded a Compaq Evo 510s from Hardy to Lucid. The first problem I encountered was instability running X-windows. The display would go black with a few white stripes.

It seems I wasn't alone - other Lucid users with Intel's integrated graphics chip were reporting similar problems. Several solutions have been proposed. I went with the simplest - switching to the VESA video driver. This solves the problem at the expense of losing hardware accelerated graphics. However, as the Evo is essentially a thin-client this wasn't a problem.

Real and Windows media playback

In addition to restricted video formats such as MPEG, playback of other non-free formats such as Real media and Windows media, also requires manual installation. This comprehensive guide provides details. In my case I installed totem-xine (and its firefox-plugin), RealPlayer 10 and the win32 codecs.

MPEG/MPG movie player

By default Ubuntu Dapper Drake supports various free video formats (ogg vorbis/theora) but not restricted formats such as MPEG. Therefore, following this informative guide, it is necessary to install the gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly (and optionally mpg321 & vorbis-tools) package in order to view MPEGs in the Totem movie player. These packages are available from the "Universe" and "Multiverse" repositories.

Install latest nVidia GeForce drivers

The Dell Inspiron 9400 I have comes with the nVidia GeForce Go 7900 GS graphics card. There are "restricted" (closed source) drivers for this card with superior support for hardware graphics acceleration compared with the default open-source "nv" drivers.

To install the nvidia drivers I used "Method 1" from this excellent guide

1. installed the nvidia-glx and linux-restricted-modules-2.6.15-23-686 packages
2. enabled the driver using sudo nvidia-xconfig
   
3. added the nvidia-settings dialog to the Application > System menu
4. Restarted xserver (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace)
   

It worked flawlessly.