tech.sweetnam.eu

I’ve had another hard disk failure on my primary workstation so until I get a replacement disk I will be using my Macbook. Now while I love my Macbook as a laptop it becomes a bit difficult and uncomfortable to use all day. So seeing as my main workstation is lying idle I hooked up its LCD, keyboard and mouse to make things a bit easier.

I’ve done this before but if you haven’t or would like to I have this little tip for you:

Hook everything up to your Macbook or Macbook Pro, turn on the power and immediately close the lid!

This will enable you to use your external display at its proper resolution. Otherwise you will find that your external display will mirror the built in one. And the resolution which on my Macbook is 1280×800 will be the same. The only other option under System Preferences is to use it as additional screen space under which it will work at its ideal screen resolution.

So if you only want your external display to be your primary display there you go!

I tend to have multiple ssh sessions open at once to my multiple *nix machines. However despite all the best attempts to keep some order all the windows tend to clutter up the desktop. Gnome terminal goes some way to easing that pain by supporting tabs but it would be even nicer if I could have multiple consoles all in a single window.

After a bit of digging I came across Gnome Terminator.

It’s a rather nice simple terminal console app but where it wins for me is that if you right click inside the terminal you can split the terminal horizontally or vertically or any combination of both. If you see my screenshot below it will give you a good idea. And yes almost all my machines are names after characters in Stargate!

Chances are that there are already pre-built binaries available for your distribution. At least there is for my Ubuntu workstation so it was a simple

sudo apt-get install terminator

It’s certainly worth checking out if like me you like to have lots of console windows open.

Terminator in action