Ecumenism

Hey kids, happy February!

Today is Four Chaplains Day, an observance of one of the more inspiring tales of self-sacrifice of WWII, and a right and proper time to reflect on the ways to give life, both literal and figurative, in the name of our Lord.

You remember how my January 1 post was nothing more than a complaint about installing Compiz on my XPS L702X? Well, if you follow this link, you'll see that I'm not the only one who's run afoul of the XPS's not-Linux-friendly architecture. But if you read that guy's "solution," you'll see that there are not quite enough of us out there to warrant any helpful action from Ubuntu.

Let me give away the punchline first: I eventually found a solution to the problem. I was so excited about it at first that I briefly entertained the idea of doing a complete write-up on the problem and the solution but it later occurred to me that everybody would hate that, so I'll just mention one part that I thought was super-cute. Incidentally, if you weren't a fan of the Transformers cartoon, you may not think it's quite so cute.

So my XPS L702X has two graphics cards: a native Intel card that is built into the motherboard, and an nVidia GeForce GT 555M 3GB with Optimus. What is Optimus, you might ask? It is essentially a driver set that shuts off your powerful nVidia graphics card and switches to your more battery friendly Intel card when you're performing tasks that are not graphics intensive, like... most things you might do. Aaanyway, Optimus only runs on Windows 7 and nVidia apparently has no plans of writing a port for Linux now or at any time in the foreseeable future. But you know what's fun? During my roving around in search of an answer I came across the blog of this guy in Denmark who claimed to have successfully adapted some graphics drivers that had been written by another nVidia/Linux project and he had gotten it to run properly on his XPS. His name for his driver set is "Ironhide."

Who's ready for the big game this Sunday? Go Ireland!

-Ryan