So, I got tired of having a single screen for my home desktop. Both BestBuy and Staples were running sales on 20″ monitors. After some research, I decided to purchase the AOC E2060SWD. It’s not a bad monitor, just slightly smaller than my HP S2031 that I was currently using.
If my videocard supported it, I would have purchased two of them and then also gotten a triple monitor stand. Sadly, my ATI 5750 only supports two monitors*.
Ubuntu happily accepted it PnP and after plugging it in and powering it on, recognized the monitor and set it up. Wish everything was this easy 🙂
My primary motivation for a 2nd monitor was to run my normal desktop duties on one and use the second one for a VNC client. After much research, I found out the bar isn’t able to be removed but it discarded when a window is in full screen mode. Ended up just leaving the bar at the top.
I then turned my attention to my VNC server. I edited /sys/sysconfig/vncservers and upped the resolution to 1600×875 so it exactly matches the screen with the black bar above on my 2nd monitor.
The next step was to figure out how to set up Windows XP in my Virtualbox system to allow me to play MTGO with sound. While I can play through the VNC server, it’s still not really snappy. I ended up enabling RDP on the XP computer and then configuring my desktop to connect to the XP computer directly (without using RDP through virtualbox which is extremely laggy). Doing it directly through the XP machine makes the RDP connection much smoother.
Now I’m downloading MTGO Beta Client to the XP VM and will start playing some online MTG on my time off 🙂