Progress on the fglrx dual monitor issue

So, I've been poking around and I'm noticing that xrandr is printing out some very funny things in 13.04.

On 12.10, this is what xrandr tells me:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2390 x 768, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS1 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 309mm x 174mm
VGA1 connected 1024x768+1366+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 267mm x 200mm

On 13.04, notice the difference in resolution:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2390 x 777, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS1 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 309mm x 174mm

VGA1 connected 1024x768+1366+9 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 267mm x 200mm

So, this is why the screen seems pushed to the side and is causing the whole misalignment of my desktop.  There must be a way to set xrandr to how it was in 12.10.  I have to keep looking.

I've tried to reconfigure xrandr:
xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1366x768 --pos 0x0 --output VGA1 --mode 1024x768 --pos 0x0 --right-of LVDS1

This gives me the correct xrandr configuration on 12.10:
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2390 x 768, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS1 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 309mm x 174mm
VGA1 connected 1024x768+1366+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 267mm x 200mm

But this did not fix my error.  The screen would go off just the same.  This feels like a regression on xrandr and/or fglrx.

Unsurprising Failure of being with AMD

Today, I upgraded my HP Pavilion G4-2123TX from 12.10 to 13.04.  I was very leery of the AMD hardware and I expected problems.  Well, I got them alright!

First off, the AMD drivers bombed HARD.  No amount of reinstall and reconfigure would help.  I would two helpful links that helped me get through this (here and here).  It is annoying to see AMD hardware fail so hard at simply working but such is the life of AMD owners.

Next problem was the wifi.  No matter what I did, I could not get my wifi to work with my security even though everything worked perfectly fine on the old 12.10 install.  I changed my security to WPA/TKIP from WPA2/AES and that seemed to help quite a bit (which messed with the wifi connectivity of my phone.  Ah, c'est la vie.)

Lastly, dual monitor is broken in my laptop.  Broken.  Bad.  Still no solution in sight yet.

Where did my workspaces go?

I'll keep this one brief.  Go to Settings and then Appearance.  Under the Behaviour Tab is a checkbox 'Enable Workspaces'.

Upgrade to Ringtail

I must admit, I am impressed that this panned out much more painless than I expected.  Everything looks a-okay but I did have a problem in getting two things to work.

Google Chrome looks for libudev.so.0 which is missing.  I had to do a symlink from libudev.so.1 to make it work.

Steam's apt repository does not seem to have Raring Ringtail versions.  I disabled the repository for now.  Steam itself seems to be working.

Android cpu usage and disk consumption

I came across an interesting topic on the matter of cpu usage being terribly high on Android tablets.  In my experience and via Watchdog Lite's monitoring, I've deduced that the media scanner in Android is a common resource hog.  I, however, didn't know how to deal with it until now.  Browsing through forums, someone pitched the idea of using a storage analyzer.  This will give you an idea which folders in your system hold the most number of files and which are eating up your space.

Using such tools and there are plenty on Google Play, I found that a lot of the Gameloft games have huge number of files and which ones have large disk space consumption.  Since the media scanner is such a darn plonker and has to scan your entire system, we need to make it stop from the insanity.

What I did was place a bunch of .nomedia files on the largest folders that I know shouldn't be scanned at all.  It seems to help with performance quite a bit!  As far as I can tell, the file also kills folder lookup recursion, so it should help the media scanner behave.  Try it!