2 monitors

I've bought myself a second monitor for home. I now have 2 20 inch widescreen displays sat next to each other (rather messily at the minute) on my desk.

The plan now is to remove my small 17 inch monitor, and plug the server into one of the spare ports on the 20 inch ones. I can then tidy up the various router, switches, and other bits of various stuff, and ultimately claim some space back on the desk itself.

Even I was surprised at how easy it was to setup. I plugged the monitor in whilst booted up and logged on, opened 'Monitor and display', ticked the box to indicate a 2nd monitor, selected the drop down to choose I wanted 2 desktops, not one stretched across the screen, chose my monitor type from the drop down (it was listed, something that has *never* happened under windows), clicked ok, logged out, chose restart x sever (not the box, just the window manager), eh voila! It all worked. I'd made a minor error by plugging the left one into the right socket and vice versa, but rather than fix that I just entered 'Monitor and display' again and dragged the second screen to the left of the first. Another logoff, restart, logon, and the problem was resolved.

I've done 2nd monitors for a while at work, and to acheive the same functionality I've always had to install manufacturers software. On linux all of this was built into the OS. There was no command line hacking of config files (I've done that in the past, but there was no need this time), nothing to install, it just worked. As it's meant to.

Now I just need the weekend to tidy up and get everything in its new place.

Seperately, and to show the flip side of linux, I'm struggling with a piece of software called imagemagick. I've had problems with this software before, but managed to get it sorted (although I can't remember how). I have a script that executes a number of tasks to automate turning media files into DVDs. One of the things it does is create the menus, for which it needs imagemagick to input the text. When I upgraded the other day to kubuntu 8.04 my version of imagemagick was overwritten with one not compiled to use ghostscript fonts (key for creating text). Not a problem I thought, so I downloaded the code for imagemagick, made sure the ghostscript fonts were where it expected them to be, and ran configure. It comes back with ghostscript fonts - none.

It doesn't matter what I do here, I can add a parameter to the program specifically telling it where the fonts are, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. The code always comes back with ghostscript fonts - none. I've even stepped through the relevant bit of configure line by line, and it works! However, somewhere between finding the fonts and getting to the end it breaks, and will not compile with ghostscript fonts. This is not making me happy. There has to be a bug somewhere, but I can't find it, and until I have a moment of brilliance, I can't make any new DVDs.

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