Dell Latitude E6320 and Xubuntu 11.04

Hardware issues continued with the new Latitude. The Ubuntu certified E6320 has a different hardware spec to the machine I bought, and while I might be able to extract some of the hardware devices from the E6500, I wanted a more complete OS solution.

UPDATE, 27 August 2011: I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 'Classic'... see this post to see how stupid I was being and some set-up instructions.

I tried Ubuntu 11.04 on a spare drive, and it's hardware support is great out of the box, but the Unity interface is still shit. Hear that, Canonical, Unity is shit. I like a nice, small, clean single panel at the top of my display. I still like the clearlooks theme for it's simplicity. So Unity, with it's pop-out, animated, heavy shortcut bar is immediately off-putting.

Time to go and take another look at Xfce. Xubuntu... the 11.04 release proves the Xfce project has come a long way in the last couple of years. It's clean, fresh and more importantly, light.

Dual Screen
I have two 1680x1050 monitors on my desk, attached to the e-Port Plus docking station. Unfortunately, Xfe has poor dual screen support. The GUI will only allow you to set the resolution and output of screens, there is no option for extended desktop. To extend your desktop, you'll be needing some command line action.

xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --right-of HDMI3

This works because you're telling xrandr to manually set the output options. You might have to swap your displays around in the command to see which one belongs on the right. You can find out the sintax for your monitors by going to 'Settings Manager', selecting 'Display'.

Now that you have the comand you are happy will set the output correctly, you can make a small script that will execute the command for you, and set up a panel launcher so you can attach the lappy to the dock, click your display button and presto.

#!/bin/bash
xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --right-of HDMI3
exit 0