So today I officially started my summer job at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Till now I've been using an empty office, the guy who had it moved to Oslo (wouldn't we all want to..). In the office there are 3 monitors and two desktops. I had been using my laptop all this time, cause it was the easiest for me. I also worked a lot from home during the project but now that I'll be at the office, I decided it would be more comfortable to have a desktop computer. So I asked if I could use one of the two in my office, and the boss had no reason to object. I was gonna put Ubuntu on it for a fast install, but the socket on the cdrom didn't seem to match the IDE cable. So I go talk to a co-worker and I explain the problem about the socket on the cdrom drive being too wide for the ide cable. "You mean like... scsi?" "Right" Hell, I had never actually seen a scsi drive, it never occured to me that's what it was, I thought it was some wacko non-standard crap.

So I burnt an Ubuntu installcd and went from there. The install took a while, considering the computer isn't state of the art (dual Pentium3 500MHz w/ 512MB SDRAM). But when it was time for X to come up on the screen, all I got was a blank screen. Xorg didn't kill the session and report an error, the image just wasn't there. I checked the logs and there was nothing anywhere to suggest a display problem. Now, I'm not good with hardware because I'm not at all hip on hardware. To me hardware is just an obstacle in order to get to the software. But while I was moving the case around a few months ago, I noticed it was connected to two different monitors. I didn't think much of it at the time, but now it suddenly struck me. For some reason this baby had two video cards. So I plugged in the other monitor and what do you know, there's X. Weirdo. I switch back to console, it's back on the monitor in front of me. So I got X on one, console on the other, but not at the same time.

After a while, my co-worker comes by to check that I got it working and we start chatting. "You know if you'll be working here for a while, I really recommend one those 21 inch flat monitors we have.." Well, duh. "Well, I'm just satisfied using what is already here." Now get this, from the time I first took the office, there was this big box from DELL lying in the window. I never even thought about opening it, figured I'm just a temp, I'm not gonna mess with their stuff. So my co-worker spots it and walks up to the window. "Dude, this IS one of those flat screens". Turns out back when they bought them, every office got one. It had been just lying there in a box all this time. So I start unwrapping it and now I got my own uber-cool 21'' beauty. :cool: