Ehhh, I’m an Apple fanboy, and I think that it’s fine that you use Ubuntu. Whatever makes you happy, man.

But let’s say, just for kicks, that my spare time is worth minimum wage. Even though it isn’t, and nobody really assigns a value to their spare time (otherwise they’d spend it working, not reading books and watching TV and whatever else).

I figure I’ve spend about twenty or thirty hours just tooling around with Ubuntu. At minimum wage, which is somewhere around $10 in Canada, that’s something like $300. But let’s just say for the sake of argument that it’s more like one hundred hours and $1000.00 and that there’s no income tax on it or anything like that.

I have three computers running Ubuntu, two of which are commodity hardware that I got for free. I use them (respectively) as a surround-sound jukebox for my and my wife’s bedroom, and a media PC for my television (it plays DVDs, streams television, views YouTube, etc).

I got both these computers for free because they’re old and only worth $50 or something a piece. But they work well with Ubuntu and have both been rock solid over their lifetimes. From perusing Craigslist, I’m under the impression that a Macintosh with similar capabilities would run me around $200.00.

So I’m about $400 ahead.

Add to that my commodity PC which I bought without Windows, which cost me $1500.00 (dual graphics cards and all) about a year ago. A similar Macintosh (not that I was able to find one with dual video cards, mind you) would run me, going back in time, something in the range of $2500.00.

Now I’m $1400.00 ahead.

Then I’d have to buy all the equivalent software that doesn’t run on a Mac but does run on Ubuntu. So add on another $200.00 or so just for software.

Now I’m $1600.00 ahead.

So even with the grossly exaggerated one hundred hours and $1000.00 on my time, I’m $600.00 ahead of the Mac OS X route.

You can even count in the time it took me to write this really, really long comment.

But in the end none of that matters. I like Ubuntu because I love to tinker. I love to fool around with software and break things and fix them and watch Linux develop into a world-class desktop operating system.

I dislike having my computer usage dictated by the manufacturer. My wife runs OS X. It’s pretty nice. I fix Windows for a living at work. I’ve chosen the third way because it’s exactly want I want: mine to do with what I wish. Money is only a secondary consideration.

dan

i got the same problem after upgrading to Hardy: MetaModes in the xconf didn’t work as intended.
The more interesting thing is, with nvidia-settings i can create the missing MetaModes. My games see them and work! (UT & Q4).
Unfortunately i’ve not a way to create this with a nvidia-settings commandline parameter :-/
Perhaps i find enough time to look into the source code ..

I have a laptop and had my external 21″ has the second monitor. Since the upgrade it no longer works and no one seems to know why! I suspect the nvidia drivers are broken because as you mentioned the problem is at the detection stage, or rather the lack of it!

I tried displayconfig-gtk and it did see a second generic monitor but after restarting x the monitor still remains with “no signal”. Arghh, how frustrating.

This is I think a massive issue and I’m hoping that it’s being given the priority that it deserves. The driver for my network card a also broken due to wrong detection. So I had no internet to fix it but that’s another story.

Keep us updated case you find solution to getting the monitors detected.

From what I can understand, my problem results because the X server included with Hardy uses a newer version of xrandr than the binary NVidia drivers support, thus the breakage.

I understand that, that’s not Ubuntu’s fault, of course they can’t fix code that they can’t see and distribute. But then it should work with the NV driver, its open-source bastard cousin, which hasn’t been my experience at all. Plus, I rather like Compiz.

What really gets me is how my screens are no longer properly detected. I can live with that as long as I can simply force X do what I want it to — I’m willing to tinker for a few hours — but it would appear I can no longer do that. Perhaps it’s just the general lack of information in the community about the most recent changes to X.org. I don’t know. I haven’t found a way to get around any of this.

Plus other bizarre things are happening now. Even with just two monitors, full screen games seem to switch metamodes after about 20 minutes which completely borks all input. I have to drop to tty1 and kill whatever I’m playing before I can ctrl-alt-f7 back to GDM.

So yeah, I’m sick of being on the leading edge, and also a little sick of Ubuntu’s unwillingness to delay releases for QA. I’m going back.

Although I really like the Transmission app. Very nice.

Now I’m trying to set up an older laptop with the same version and the resolution is different every time I boot. When I can ACTUALLY see the desktop through a haze of static and double-images (and the monitor is working) adjusting the settings through the gui is doing absolutely nothing. I ended up trying the good old dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg command but of course it’s useless, and I found your helpful blog to tell me why. Arg. If I don’t figure this out soon I’ll be hitting up the linux help forums… shudder.. :-P