Tools key brings up settings in Ubuntu 19.10

One of the things I really liked to do was to set up my keyboard's Tools Key to put the computer into suspend. On my dell keyboard (y-uk-del1), the Tools key is a special key that has a little Music Symbol on it.

But after upgrading to Ubuntu 19.10 the Tools key will now bring up the settings window. So what to do?

All I had to do was to set the shortcut to Super+Tools which did the trick, or find another key to do it. There's a special "Home Page" key on the function row that works as well.


I wanted them both to do the suspend action but you can only assign a single shortcut key, so why not create two custom shortcuts, one for each key.





Also I discovered that you can put the computer into suspend by holding down the mouse button over the power button in the System Menu. Then the power button changes into a pause symbol. Holding down alt also works to choose suspend instead of power off.

Fiddling with the Matrox DualHead2Go on ubuntu

I saw one of these on ebay so I thought I'd give it a spin. I got the dualhead2go digital edition which has VGA input and dual DVI outputs.

If you don't know what a DualHead2Go is, it takes a video signal in and splits it across 2 monitors, effectively giving you an additional monitor out. The catch is that your computer video card must output a very high VGA resolution, 3840x1080 if you want dual 1920x1080 monitors.

On my laptop with Ubuntu 19.04 that has integrated intel graphics, it will only output 2*1360x768 (2720x768) resolution on the VGA port. Anything higher and I get "failed to configure crtc1".

These are all of the different resolutions supported by the DualHead2go:


single standard landscape



single monitor wide landscape





dualhead wide landscape




dualhead standard portrait



dualhead wide portrait




There's a limit of 4 settings that you can preset. These will show up on the matrox's EDID.

So after enabling 3480x1080 double 1920x1080 ,2560x1600 (double 1280x800 portrait), 2720x768 (double 1360x768)
the edid returns:

(if you don't have get-edid then sudo apt install read-edid)

sudo get-edid | parse-edid

Section "Monitor"
Identifier ""
ModelName ""
VendorName "MTX"
# Monitor Manufactured week 30 of 2005
# EDID version 1.3
# Analog Display
Option "SyncOnGreen" "true"
# Display Physical Size not given. Normal for projectors.
Gamma 2.20
Option "DPMS" "true"
#Not giving standard mode: 1600x1200, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1280x1024, 60Hz
Modeline "Mode 0" 261.01 3840 3856 3904 3920 1080 1083 1094 1111 +hsync -vsync
Modeline "Mode 1" 271.00 2560 2608 2640 2744 1600 1603 1615 1646 +hsync -vsync
Modeline "Mode 2" 171.00 2720 2848 2960 3584 768 771 774 795 +hsync +vsync
EndSection



matrox powerdesk



There's options to swap displays, adjust image quality




I used an old windows vista machine and installed PowerDesk to set the settings on the box. It wants a good signal going into it so I left my ubuntu system plugged into the VGA generating a signal, while the USB was plugged into the windows vista box. If there's no VGA signal going into the box, PowerDesk won't let you set the modes in the mode management settings. As long as there's a signal, even if it's not originating from the vista box, you're fine. Once you've programmed the settings on the box, you can disconnect the usb from the vista box. You do need to plug in the usb to a usb port to get power.

So the big problem is one of getting a VGA signal of sufficiently hi-res, namely 3840x1080. My laptop with ubuntu 19.04 and intel graphics would only do 2720x768. What about another machine?

I installed Ubuntu 19.10 on another system with an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3470 CPU @ 3.20GHz. The integrated graphics would come up at 3840x1080 but for some reason, the acceleration was nonexistent. It was so slooooooooow, the system was running but it was slow. I did have an idea, why not try wayland? Selecting wayland at the boot screen came up fine with acceleration. Awesome.

There's also an AMD Cedar graphics card in this system, and strangely it wouldn't go higher than 2720x768. 3840x1080 would give me a black screen. Oddly, booting this same system under knoppix 8.6.1 livecd would give the 3840x1080 resolution on the AMD Cedar.


00:02.0 Display controller: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v2/3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cedar [Radeon HD 5000/6000/7350/8350 Series]


One of the things about an ultrawide screen is that youtube fullscreen is problematic, since it splits it across two monitors. I wish that fullscreen could be setup to go to the left side or the right side of the full double-monitor.

Adjusting the image quality needed a "special image" so I made my own in gimp by hand. It's an 3840x1080 image of alternating black and white lines.
Once I made this image, I just viewed it in fullscreen with eog, hitting f11 to go fullscreen.



The full image doesn't come through with blogger's image system, so here's a piece of it if you want to make your own 3840x1080 by stitching:



I tried to snapshot the image display when PowerDesk would overlay the desktop with the alternating lines, but the PrintScreen key would just give me the normal desktop. I don't know if my version works as intended but I hope it does.

Someday, they'll have sorted the high resolution VGA outputs on linux, I suppose most people don't have any use for such resolutions as most people don't have matrox DualHead2Gos.