I’ve spent a couple of days trying to get multiple monitors working on my desktop at home. I wanted to get it working in a similar way to Windows with Ultramon. This basically puts an individual task bar on your extra monitors. While there isn’t any real documentation on how to do this at the moment it is simple. The setup should be using Xinerama, without using it, the monitors act as separate computers with a common keyboard and mouse.

If you are using Gnome, right-click on any of the existing panels and select “New Panel”. This will give you an extra panel which you can drag to wherever you like on the second screen. To add functionality, right-click on the new panel and select “Add to panel” this let’s you add desktop switchers, application menus and application switchers.

Dave has been trying to get a similar thing working with remote computers as the second head. He is currently using x2x which uses the VNC protocol, but I don’t think it will allow him to use Xinerama. He found another project that may allow him to get all the flexibility he wants, DMX.

I spent a fair amount of time in the last couple of days trying to do some fairly advanced configuration of network interfaces on a couple of Ubuntu boxes today. Basically the Debian package ifup when run will run every script in /etc/network/if-up.d/ it set’s the environment variable IFACE for each script while doing this. This means if you want to run a script only when one interface comes up, (possibly for a firewall) you can use the line in your script

if [ "$IFACE" = "eth0" ]; then

As a side note, the reason I’m using Ubuntu for these machines is it’s reasonably fast development cycle and it’s Debian underpinnings. Packages like ifup are part of this, it works exceptionally well and is reasonably easy to use, the biggest problem however is it’s documentation. Nowhere in the man files or on a few searches of the net could I find this information.