(Continuing from Tuesday’s post).

Fluxbox is a nice lightweight window manager, but on this system it came up with a screen resolution of 1400×1050 — too high for my 59 year old eyes on a 15″ monitor. I could get a 1024×768 resolution with GNOME, but it would not carry over to Fluxbox. With Slackware I could do this by altering /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but that file is not normally present in Ubuntu 9.10. However, I could generate one by

sudo Xorg -configure

The resultant file did not specify any screen resolution, but that was easily fixed by editing the “Screen” section to add a “Modes” line to each “Display” subsection.

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Card0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     1
                Modes	"1024x768"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     4
                Modes	"1024x768"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     8
                Modes	"1024x768"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     15
                Modes	"1024x768"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     16
                Modes	"1024x768"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Modes	"1024x768"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

I also installed AbiWord and Gnumeric, which I think will run faster than their OpenOffice counterparts, which were installed with Ubuntu.