Yesterday I installed Intrepid Ibex 8.10 on my aging (now ex-gaming) desktop machine in an attempt to breathe new life into it.  I wound up biting the bullet and ordering a new monitor and Xbox 360 for games, so now I’ve got two monitors.  Neither the Lenovo nor the Mac laptop I’ve got support two external monitors, so I thought I would give the desktop a try.  Though the installation went fairly well, two really annoying things weren’t working correctly, and a third I’m still dealing with.

First, the mouse.  I have a Razer Copperhead USB mouse that’s been great for years and when I first booted after the installation, it didn’t work.  The lights came on, but I couldn’t move it.  If I unplugged it and plugged it back in, it worked fine.  This would happen every time I rebooted the machine: no movement, unplug, plug back in.  After some digging around, I found the problem was that the mouse firmware had to be upgraded.  Of course, Razer only has the update software for Windows, so after some screwing around with that, I rebooted with the Linux machine and it worked fine without having to unplug the mouse.

Second, the dual head support for my ATI video card was lacking after the initial install, just mirroring my primary monitor onto the other.  I was able to fix this by installing the proprietary ATI drivers and using the ATI Catalyst Control Center to “merge” both screens into one.  Of course, this didn’t entirely fix the problem since every time I rebooted, the mirroring came back.  I finally found out that after I set the displays correctly in the ATI Control Center that I had to open up the Ubuntu Display Settings panel and hit “Apply”.

Both of these problems were really annoying, kept me searching and frustrated for hours, and have rather quirky solutions.  While I really like Linux, stuff like this doesn’t seem to happen as much with Mac or Windows.  However, community support is pretty good so after some extensive research I was finally able to find others with my problems that had found solutions.

Now everything seems to be working well, except that the stand for my monitor arrived bent.  It’s only a couple millimeters out of shape and the box it came in seemed undamaged, so I’m not sure what happened.  It’s bad enough that when I type sometimes the monitor wobbles.  It’s something I could probably live with, but the wobbling is annoying and I paid for a new product (not refurbished) so I don’t feel like letting it go.  So, I spent two hours with phone tree hell HP tech support about returning it and then filed an RMA request from the online vendor.  It would be best if I could just replace the stand since the monitor is fine — there’s only one stuck pixel.  Shipping the whole thing back is going to be expensive if the RMA is approved.  I guess the question is if the bent stand is worth another $30.

I still haven’t gotten to the Xbox yet because of all this (and some other annoying legwork type stuff for a research proposal that is due this week).  It also turns out that I got the wrong RCA to mini-stereo adapter and will have to try to exchange that so I can plug in the Xbox sound to the line in on my PC.  The whole thing is kind of funny because part of the reason I went with an Xbox was to avoid dealing with putting together a new system and troubleshooting the whole thing when a bunch of stuff doesn’t work.  Instead, I got more than I bargained for.