Some time ago, when I left Faria, I bought a laptop with a clear purpose. I wanted to have on linux the same screen experience that I had with the macbook pro connected to 2 thunderbolts. So I got an asus UX301L plus 2 Dell screens U2713HM who supports a 2560x1440 resolution. The laptop in itself is amazing, dazzling fast, and all worked well with an ubuntu install. This was not cheap but that was a while I didn’t spend anything on hardware.

I struggled a bit to find the proper connectors so I could enable the extra large resolution on connected screens. I ended up using the mini-hdmi connector plus a mini-display port converter to DVI for the second one. And finally it worked last week. I had to force the resolution in xrandr and now I have a damn huge double display for a total of 7680x1440. What a blast!

Debian, i3wm and urxvt

Well this is an old story. Some time ago I switched from debian + fvwm2/ion to ubuntu + cinnamon just because I had to know about it. The goal was to be able to convince my wife (and some other non-techies) to switch to ubuntu. But I had to know how it worked on a daily basis. And it was a success for most of it.

2 years ago at Faria I was given a mac. Well, it was good to know a bit more about it, my mac knowledge was dating from system 6.7 time. But if the hardware is really good, the OSX experience didn’t really satisfy the geek that was deep inside me.

Then I got back into a team that is deeply attached to pure linux traditions, when I joined Gandi. I now switched back to a debian jessie with i3wm on my work laptop. Wow this feels good to be back to such a rude but flexible environment. As a matter of fact all went perfectly well and all the tricks I knew 10 years ago are still very valid.

I also took that occasion to get back into urxvt, for my terminal emulator. It’s a very badly documented over-powerful tool. But when you get the grasp on it, possibilities are much more satisfying than with gnome-terminal. I’m still working on my configuration to match few features that gnome terminal had (like font resizing, clipboard management). The notification plugin, combined with dunst, gives amazing results.

It feels good to be back into the cave. To mark this change, I didn’t shave for 3 months so now I’m really bearded like the old-fashioned linux bears. Muhaha!

PS: no worry, I’m still fullstack at heart and I still love ruby!