Tag Archives: ubuntu

Re-enable virtual terminals on Ubuntu 12.04

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In the past month I’ve been getting accustomed to Ubuntu 12.04, and all of the changes it brings to the user interface of Ubuntu. One issue I’ve been especially bothered by is the lack of virtual terminals, at least of users of NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers (myself included). The issue seems to stem from the fact that Ubuntu 12.04 makes use of a hardware framebuffer to draw a splash screen on boot, which causes issues with the driver when attempting to switch virtual terminals. I had a hard time finding any solutions to my problem, until I found this post on AskUbuntuร‚ย which gives a couple suggestions. While the poster suggests going all out and completely disabling graphical boot, he also suggests a less drastic solution, adding a flag to the linux boot options that prevent loading framebuffer modes that interfere with virtual terminals.

To do this, open /etc/default/grub in a text editor and find the line that reads

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

and change it to read

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash vga=normal"

Rebooting your computer should leave the grub menu and boot splashscreen unchanged, while the virtual terminals work perfectly! Of course, your mileage may vary, depending on your system. This works for me on a fully updated install of Ubuntu 12.04, with an NVIDIA 9800 GT.

Conky Calendar with Date Highlight

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Since I got a new desktop a month or so ago, I’ve been running Ubuntu as my main operating system, and am using Conky for a nice heads-up-display. There are a lot of articles on the web about both Ubuntu and Conky, but one thing I couldn’t find a good, accurate how-to on was getting a calendar that highlighted the current date. While getting the calendar is easy using the cal command, actually getting the date highlighted is somewhat hard, and all of the articles I found suggested methods that broke in various situations. However, I managed to get it all worked out, and have a beautiful calendar that looks like this:

After the jump, I’ll give you the code and explain how it all works. Continue reading →