The New Hotness

I’m in the process of figuring out which Ubuntu 9.10 desktop will work with my collection of hardware. That I got all this working successfully with Xubuntu 8.10 is most likely a testament to raw determination rather than good sense, but that’s water over the dam.

The hardware:

• Kensington Expert Mouse trackball (must use left-hand buttons)
• Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman (must use right-hand buttons)
• Wacom Graphire3 6×8 tablet (must swap side buttons)
• Dell 2001FP 1600×1200 landscape display (left side)
• Dell 2005FP 1680×1050 portrait display (right side)
• nVidia GeForce 9400 GT dual-DVI card (using nVidia driver)
• Dell Dimension 9150 deskside PC
• Intel HDA Stac92 on-board sound (system sounds)
• Ensoniq AudioPCI plug-in sound (unused right now)
• Logitech USB audio headset (phone calls)

General requirements:

• Monitors must use separate X sessions, not Xinerama or TwinView
• 2005FP must be rotated 1/4 turn CCW into portrait mode
• *buntu preferred, due to large user base

After some trial installations and moderate fiddling, some of which served as blog fodder:

• Kubuntu doesn’t work, as KDE 4.x can’t handle separate X sessions
• Xubuntu is OK, but tends to not have nearly the support of Ubuntu
• Ubuntu comes heartbreakingly close to working

Problems:

• Rotating that monitor is a real problem
• I don’t need RandR, but static rotation in xorg.conf causes other problems
• The tablet wants to cover both screens, but that’s fixable
• Trackball handedness requires careful FDI tweakage
• Previous xorg.conf setup is not useful in the new world of FDI files
• Most configuration documentation isn’t useful in that new world, either

Installations on other household PCs  have gone reasonably well. Installation on my desktop box is in a spare partition, so I can return to What Worked without too much trouble.

With all that in hand, here we go …