Wild-Heart.net

At the close of a week that seemed fought with the difficulties of the the dramas of the bus situation and school IEP compliance difficulties with Boy #1, and the struggles of attempting to get Boy #2 to focus on his homeschool work instead of drifting off into drawing and music applications, there have been a couple of positive things happen this week. They are very significantly positive things for me.

1. Bonus Boy’s mother and I are finally communicating.
2. My sister and I are communicating again after nearly two years of silence.

The week ended much better, really, than it started. I have to remind myself of that fact. Living in a testosterone ladened household tends to make it very difficult to see the trees for the forest at times. Any who. I’ll probably get grief for the song I’m about to leave you with but hey, it’s a feel good song and it’s a positive one.

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All to frequently, I am reminded that while I love to tinker and fight my way through Linux user difficulties and make my OS bend to my will, I never post my solutions. That’s rather thoughtless of me and I swear I’ll try to better from now on. This latest difficulty was getting an actual widescreen resolution that our Vizio HDTV would recognize and that my ATI video card would display.

You might wonder why I would even want to go through this trouble. Well, this school year, instead of having one of the boys homeschooling using an online school, we have two and we really needed another computer running in our homeschool area of the livingroom. Both Boy #2 and Baby Boy are early risers and do their best work in the morning. With only one windows pc for their use it became obvious last week that we were going to struggle and fight if we didn’t build another frankenputer this weekend. But that left the question of where was my computer going to go? The only logical solution was to bring it upstairs. I honestly am not at my computer very often. I stop by and check my email and IM’s and downloads through the day but aside from that, I’m too busy with the boys. So here I now sit at the loveseat that is placed at the end of our bed with my computer attached to the 26″ HDTV.

For two days all I could get the television to work with the video card was a resolution of 1024×768. It wasn’t pretty. Well, It was pretty but it was also pretty stretched on the horizontal. No amount of configuration of xoorg.conf seemed to solve the problem. I searched the Ubuntu formums to no avail. Every solution found there failed. I did however find one mention of setting the modeline in xorg.conf for the monitor to be specific for the video card. It took me over 12 hours of more searching to find a way ti fingure out how to go about figuring what the modeline for my video card would be. Eventually I found this HOWTO Widescreen Resolutions on Gentoo-wiki.org.

As you can see their instructions are specific for an Nvidia card but the same theory applies for ATI/fglrx. If you have an ATI card and drivers insalled and having the same difficulties here are the lines in Xorg.0.log that we (yes, even Joseph happily joined in on the Linux fun this time) found and used to make my custom modeline for xorg.conf:

(II) fglrx(0): Supported additional Video Mode:
(II) fglrx(0): clock: 85.5 MHz Image Size: 1096 x 640 mm
(II) fglrx(0): h_active: 1360 h_sync: 1424 h_sync_end 1536 h_blank_end 1792 h_border: 0
(II) fglrx(0): v_active: 768 v_sync: 771 v_sync_end 777 v_blanking: 795 v_border: 0

From that information we were able to use the sample on the gentoo wiki page linked above to come up with the following custom modeline to add to Section: “Monitor”:

ModeLine "1360x768" 85.5 1360 1424 1536 1792 768 771 777 795

After that we also added the resolution that is listed in that modeline (1360×768) to all of the display lines. Saved everything and rebooted while saying prayers with crossed fingers and held breath. Viola! I now have a happy and perfectly displayed widescreen resolution with linux. I hope this can be of some help to someone out there because honestly the information on setting up xorg to work with a widescreen HDTV is very slim.

If any of you, and I know there at a LOT of you who read and never comment, happen to know where I could find coloring pages for/from the new Transformers movie I would be eternally grateful. I’ve got a 9 year old obsessed to the point of psychotic fixation insisting that he must have something from the new movie to do his next creative writing assignment with. Thanks in advance. And yes, I have exhausted Google.

Yesterday was the first day of school for our household. Boy #2 and Baby Boy started their homeschool year and Boy #1 and Bonus Boy started their Public School year.

Already, OpenOffice.org is getting a workout. With the content controls enabled in IE7, Boy #2 cannot cheat when he uses OO.o for his various writing assignments. Yesterday he gave it a work out typing up definitions and sentences for his spelling words. This morning before 07:00 Baby Boy was at the desk and typing up his Creative Writing assignment for the day. He likes to find a coloring page and then write a story to go with it. He hates being corrected by adults but doesn’t mind the red squiggly line under misspelled words in a word processing application.

Boy #1 took to school his usual letter typed up by me for his teachers explaining his Other Health Impaired IEP seeing as the Special Services Department never gets the IEP’s to the schools prior to the start of the new school year. He seemed to really like all of his teachers and his homeroom teacher is male this year. We have a suspicion that will be a good thing as Greg responds much better to male authority figures than female authority figures.

Joseph called Bonus Boy’s mother last night and it would seem he also had an excellent first day. I wish I had pictures to share but Boy #1 has taken all of the batteries out of everything including my camera, yet again. Never fear. I shall be hunting their room for batteries out of RC cars later today (what goes around comes around) and will at least be able to take pictures of the two homeschoolers at work.

Yesterday evening was an amazingly early and quiet evening. We had all, except Baby Boy who was still sleeping, and Bonus Boy who had gone to his mother’s on Sunday, woke up at 04:00 so that goodbyes good be said and given to my mother as Joseph and I had to make the road trip with her to the Atlanta Airport and be there by 06:30. All of the children were asleep by 19:45 last night. Alas, Joseph and I were also so tired that we were both sound alseep before 22:00.

Here’s to the hope of another good day and beginning of what will hopefully be a fantastic school year!

*As a note. I apologize for leaving most of you on the blogroll neglected over the past couple of weeks. While my mom was here visiting it was just impossible to do much blog reading. By the end of the week I hope to get caught up with all of you as soon as I’ve finished upgrading to KDE 4. I’ve missed you all!

Song of the day followed of by a brief photo *cough* essay *choke* if you can call that of what the rest of my day will entail if only I lived in my fantasy world.

If the books and supplies are put away that must mean that the homeschool day is finally finished.

Yeap. Looks like the family workstation and homeschool central is straightened up for the day.

And I’ve already prepared Zen central. Even more supplies stashed away under the coffee/altar table.

Not quite yet though. Must make meatloaf first. And this is what awaits in the kitchen. *le sigh* What do you use your Ikea Blue Bag for? Awesome laundry bag for us.

I might sell my soul to for someone just to do my dishes. My mother tells me that’s what teenagers are for. I’d rather they pile up than listen to them complain about a sink full when there’s a dishwasher. Why I remember when I was a teenager we didn’t have a dish washer. And we had to walk barefoot in the snow… five miles up hill…Seriously though.. no dishwasher until this house.

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Two years ago, the in-laws gave the boys a computer for Christmas. They already had one and yes it was old and pieced together but it was running linux and worked great for them. We tried running Windows on their frankenputer but they constantly were getting spyware and trojan infections.

Enter the gift from hell. I begged my sister in-law to not let her husband follow through with this plan. He was an only child and loves spoiling the boys with video games. The problem is the video games they want to play always end up with someone angry so they’ve been removed from the computer from hell. Now it’s only for school use, public school homework and Time4Learning for homeschool use. They were warned repeated not to use Internet Exploder for any reason other than Time4Learning. And they heeded that warning until yesterday.

Boy #2 asked to be signed up for Time4Learning to use over summer vacation. He wanted to get ahead and then when the new school year starts, ask for a grade placement test. Well, he had a distraction problem. He’d sit down to do schoolwork and end up spending hours on YouTube and MySpace and accomplish very little with the school work that I was paying for him to have. I installed the Firefox plugin for parental controls and blocked everything that was a problem for the children. By #2 threw up his hands and quit his plan after 24 hrs. Then he snuck on the computer and used IE to get to the things he wanted. Now I have an infested system that if this one last thing to try doesn’t fix it is going to end up having to be reformatted and winblows reinstalled.

This is the sort of thing that led to my retirement from computer & internet support services. And I hate it that my 14 yr. old child is acting like an internet addicted techno-tard. And I hate that damn computer even more today.