I don’t know if this is a general problem or it affects only some particular video cards but I know that my old FX5500 didn’t had a chance.

After the installation process of Ubuntu itself (all went ok) when the login box appeard for the first time I noticed that the resolution was 640×480. That was very weird because all the distros I’ve ever tried on this PC were setting up by default a 1204×768 resolution.

Normally, the first thing I went to do was to change the resolution as it was very annoying. I was very surprised to see that only 640×480 mode was available. I said to myself that after I will install the nVIDIA driver everything would be ok. I installed the driver through the native hardware driver window (something like Device Manager from Windows). Rebooted the system and all was the same. Checked the available resolutions nothing was there to choose from. I was clearly seeing that the nVIDIA driver was succesfully installed because even Compiz was using it at full throthle but only on 640×480.

I tried to solve things with EnvyNG, by editing xorg.conf, installing the nVIDIA drivers the hard way, typing in a lot of commands that were related to video settings but nothing seemed to work. I did a little bit of research but nothing relevant came up. People had the same problems but their solutions were not working for me.

I was on the point of installing Ubuntu 7.10 again but the following command saved me:

gksudo displayconfig-gtk

All you have to do is to type that command in a terminal (root access is required) and from there just choose your display model and the corresponding resolution and frequency. The settings will be applied after you log in again.

This is a very easy and effective way of correcting this problem.

I already mentioned two scripts for phpbb3 that are more than useful in this post. Quick edit and quick reply are both offering you the possibility of gaining some speed when it comes to interacting with a phpbb3 forum. Their names says it all so I think no further explanation is  needed.

Furthermore there are yet two other scripts that can help you with your forum browsing. With them you can toggle pagination on and off for both threads and topics.

Another interesting script is helping you to view posts older than 24 hours. You don’t have to be an expert to change a few lines of code in order to get it to show you the latest posts in X hours (which might be useful).

A preview of the content from the last post is automatically displayed when the small post icon is hovered using this script. Unfortunately this only works on a prosilver based theme (don’t know why).

For better accessibility you can use this script because it will highlight your topics which could be relatively useful.

There are a few greasemonkey scripts for WordPress. One of them can be used to display the version of the installation behind the blog you are currently browsing. It will also tell you if that blog allows trackbacks or not.

Another script will tell you which package is used for gaining statistical information on a blog. This script knows to identify a bunch of potential stats collectors so you don’t have to worry about that. If stats collector is used you will know it.

The next greasemonkey script isn’t exclusively for WordPress as it can be used web wide. It identifies nofollow links and applies a pink background to the corresponding url, so that you can identify it.

As a wrap up these are a few interesting scripts for greasemonkey that are worth trying.

This is just a quickie because I have a little free time now as tomorrow I will be done with my final exams.

I’m sure the issue with Yahoo! Messenger stealing focus is very common out there. It is annoying mostly because for example when I am engaged in a captivating chat with a friend and I am typing really fast (~60 wpm), the flash ads from the Y!M window swap and I find myself focused on the wrong window. Of course that for me this isn’t such a big deal (but still very annoying) as it is for others who look at their keyboards as they type and when they look at the chat window and see it empty… that’s not a pleasant sight.

Now let’s cut to the chase and get rid of this problem once and for all. It’s very simple and all you have to do is to open Notepad or any other text editor and open the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (yes, that’s right, no extension there). A full explanation about that file is given and marked as a comment in the file.

So, after the default line (127.0.0.1       localhost) just add 127.0.0.1 insider.msg.yahoo.com

Well that’s it. Very simple and effective.

Here’s how it looks without ads: