Jesse Caulfield

We’ve been working an a new media center user interface, and here is the mock-up of our HD dashboard currently under development. Some make recognize the widgets as coming from your typical Debian desktop. Linux is a splendid, flexible development platform and mplayer is great for video testing.

Anyway, the idea here is to have four information panels with a main view screen and a navigable menu panel above. The menu idea is still in flux since the panel is turning out to be a suboptimal 10-foot experience.

The right-hand widgets (RHW) are simple Java xlets (think OCAP) which, when selected, launch a more functional application in the main view screen. Examples include a calendar widget displaying the date which launches a TV-based schedule assistant and weather and traffic indicators which launch larger, interactive information displays. The ambition is to link the RHWs and TV applications with a user’s personalized, free or commercial on-line services like weather, traffic, ebay, gmail, icalendar, xdrive, flickr, etc.

One thing the UI does require is 1080i. It’s OK with 720p, but the RHWs lose the ability to convey information at a glance with lower resolutions. Anyway – HDTVs are dominating sales today, which is positive.

My thoughts about enabling email on the TV continue to waver. It’ll probably be included somehow. Perhaps read only ….

For much needed eye-candy the whole system is designed with 3D graphics at its core and uses Java Open GL (JOGL). It has slick 3D wobbly transition effects, very cool alpha blending, and a very cool, snake-like menu inspired by an amazing NVidia demo I saw at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year.

When you install the nvidia-glx XORG driver it seems to hide your mouse cursor. It’s still there – it’s possible to hunt about and click windows and such if you’re lucky, but the cursor is invisible.

The problem is that rendering the mouse cursor is typically the responsibility of X. When running NVidia’s proprietary drivers X hands complete control for composite rendering, etc.

The solution is to tell the NVidia driver to draw the mouse cursor.

Add the following line to the Screen section of your xorg.conf

Option "sw_cursor"

Problem solved.

Here are excerpts from my xorg.conf file (for context)

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "nVidia Corporation C51PV [GeForce 6150]"
Monitor "hp L2335"
DefaultDepth 24

Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "True"
Option "RenderAccel" "True"
Option "SLI" "Auto"
Option "sw_cursor"



SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1920x1200" "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection


Easy.

From MikesPlanet.net

Many people are having problems installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on machine with ATI X**** series video cards. This is caused by this bug that unfortunately could not fixed before the release of Ubuntu 7.04.

This quick guide will get Feisty installed and X.org 7.2 up and running.

1. Boot using PC (Intel x86) alternate install CD for Ubuntu or Kubuntu.
2. Start text mode installer and install Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
3. Finish Install and reboot.
4. Update package list and upgrade any packages needed.
   sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
5. Install fglrx closed source driver for ATI video cards.
   sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
6. Update loaded modules.
   sudo depmod -a
7. Configure /etc/X11/xorg.conf
   sudo aticonfig --initial
sudo aticonfig --overlay-type=Xv
8. Reboot

Ubuntu 7.04 should now boot into GDM/KDM.