Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

After last week's minor catastrophe I discovered that while I have all my data nicely backed up, I was missing backups of some useful configuration files.

As many things now work basically "by magic" provided you don't need them to work properly I didn't notice until this afternoon that my beam and unbeam scripts had stopped working.

The scrips are very simple, beam basically does:

xrandr --output VGA $mode --right-of LVDS

Where $mode is --preferred unless I give something else as a parameter.

unbeam simply does:

xrandr --output VGA --off

They also disable minor annoyances like power saving and the screensaver and make some symlinks to start terminals with larger fonts. Nothing particularly exciting.

Turns out I had somehow forgotten to back up my xorg.conf file and that recent versions of X11 fail to scream about that by mostly "just working". Until you need to do something special. Like project.

I then discovered that anything I put in xorg.conf these days will basically be used against me. Grr. Only very bare bones files seems to be acceptable. Who knows where the rest of my configuration is. Probably in fancy XML files or binary formats which are quietly corrupting themselves in the background. sigh

This xorg.conf works on my ThinkPad X60s:

#
# newage xorg.conf -- anything you say will be used against you!
#
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
        Driver          "keyboard"
        Option          "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier      "Integrated Controller"
    Driver          "intel"
    BusID           "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier      "Default Screen"
    Device          "Integrated Controller"
    DefaultDepth    24
    SubSection "Display"
        Depth           24
        Virtual         2304 1792
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "Default Layout"
        Screen          "Default Screen"
        InputDevice     "Generic Keyboard"
        InputDevice     "Configured Mouse"
EndSection

Note the absence of any settings to make the trackpoint work. For some reason which is entirely beyond me, I now need to configure something called hal to make that work. In XML, with the usual 3 bytes of overhead per byte of data. mumble

In /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi:

<match key="info.product" string="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">2</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.YAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.XAxisMapping" type="string">6 7</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelTimeout" type="string">200</merge>
</match>

The userfriendly police strikes again!

I was reminded today that laptop hard disks really are unreliable. For some reason, my laptop disk just "gave up" earlier today. I have no idea why, but suddenly while I was working, it felt I should be allowed at my data anymore.

This does not please me. At all.

Happily, I have backups of pretty much all my important stuff -- in fact, I don't keep much important stuff on my laptop in the first place. Unhappily, my last backup is a couple of days old and seems to lack some configuration bits.

sigh

This weekend, some suspicious geeky types are going to the Ardennes to see the effects of a week of continuous rain on unpaved roads. I have a sneaky suspicion that mud will figure quite highly. But it will be lots of fun, and we'll be enough people to play cards and Mah Jongg.

Bram found an establishment called Les Gattes for us to stay. I'm looking forward to it.

First however, I need to go raid another cheese shop.

As blogged earlier I will be hiking the West Coast Trail this summer together with looksaus and Dieter. Ideally, we'd like to be four people so we can play cards and Mah Jongg without having to be too creative about it.

We leave from Brussels 3 July, intend to start the hike 6 July and return to Brussels 19 July.

If you are free during this period and you'd like to join us on the hike, please shout. You will need a tent, hiking experience and the ability to survive in the company of crazy people doing crazy things.