asciipr0n

I’ve got two 24″ monitors that I use side-by-side in TwinView mode in my home office, so when I look for desktop background images I hit up Mandolux. Mandolux offers free and original wallpaper in a variety of sizes for even the largest displays.

The only wrinkle in all of this is that Mandolux splits the larger widescreen backgrounds into separate left- and right-hand images. However, since I run my display in TwinView mode, my desktop is essentially a single 3840 x 1200 display ( two 1920’s side by side). For the Mandolux wallpapers to display correctly on my background I need to merge the two images into one. I could manually stitch the two images together with an image editing program like GIMP, but since I downloaded a dozen of the background images to try out, doing it manually sounded dauntingly tedious.

That’s when I remembered that the ImageMagick suite of tools includes the ‘montage’ tool. The ImageMagick tools can be installed with the following command under Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Then, to stitch the images together I ran the following command:

montage mandolux-ga2k6-*-1920.jpg -tile x1 -geometry +0+0 mandolux-ga2k6-3840.jpg

in a directory containing mandolux-ga2k6-l-1920.jpg and mandolux-ga2k6-r-1920.jpg (left and right side images, respectively). It is also worth noting here that the first filename precedes the second filename alphabetically, so the files are laid out from left to right in that order.

The result is mandolux-ga2k6-3840.jpg, which is a file with both images merged into into one 3840 x 1200 image.

When I finally got around to upgrading my Ubuntu install to 8.10 (“Intrepid Ibex”) earlier this week, I ran into an issue with my keyboard. Yeap. My keyboard.

My left-arrow key no longer worked. My right arrow-key didn’t work. My up-arrow key became Print-screen. The first thing I did was hit the Ubuntu forums, where I found about a dozen “solutions” which either didn’t work or were just plain hacks. I finally found one that worked for me:

1. Open up /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist with your favorite text editor. Make sure you open it up with root privileges.
2. Add the following line into that file. Save, close, and reboot.

   blacklist evdev

Apparently, this was a known issue in the release candidate, but they went ahead and did a general availability release by just documenting a temporary solution in a forum. Breaking keyboard functionality (it worked perfectly in 8.04) is not the way to win new users, especially when the distribution is billed as user-friendly. I’d rather they push their release date back than have a show-stopper like this make it’s way out the door.