Next month the Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds is coming. It’s a 17-inch screened, Intel Core 2 Quad’ed, 980GB hard drive’d beast.

But what makes it worth $3,600?

See that thing sticking out from the right?

You guessed it, that’s another screen. You may asking yourself “Is that a dual-screen laptop?” You are correct.

Also note the drawing tablet next to the trackpad. This sucker is loaded with goodies.

As far as the actual usefulness of a dual-monitor’d laptop.. well.. you be the judge. Useful or not?

For those of you out there that run a dual-boot system with Windows XP and Ubuntu, you’ve noticed that Ubuntu is the default OS that loads on each system startup. There is a way to change this so that XP is the default OS instead.

Full documentation:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GrubHowto/ChangeDefaultOS

What that documentation instructs you to do:

The boot order list is in a text file called menu.lst. You can edit this using a terminal text editor or by using gedit (a GUI-based text editor).

The OS choice in menu.lst is defined by the default line and title.

If for example the default num is set to 0 and you have the following in your grub.lst:

title      Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.15-27-amd64-generic
...
title      Ubuntu, memtest86+
...
title      Other operating systems:
...
title      Microsoft Windows XP Home

“0″ is representative of the first title (it starts from 0, not 1), so you would want the default num to be 4 to start Windows XP first.

For those asking “Um.. okay, so Other operating systems: is technically treated as an OS choice?” Yes it is. That’s the way it’s done in order to display it in the menu on boot.

On my personal system, Windows XP Professional is listed as title 6.

This may sound confusing but it isn’t. All you have to do is when counting the title entries, find the first one (which is 0) then count down until you find the Windows XP entry. Change default num to that number, save the file and reboot. If successful, XP will start first on boot.

For those with multi-monitor setups running Windows XP, you’ve probably run into the situation where whenever you launch a specific application it launches on the "wrong monitor". Sure, a reboot is a quick fix for this but you obviously don’t want to do this every time you want program windows to appear in their proper places.

Saving your last known window position is easy in XP if you do the following.

1. Launch the app. Yes, it will go to the "wrong monitor" as usual, but that’s okay.

2. Put the program into a "windowed" state (meaning not maximized).

3. Drag the window to the monitor where you want it to appear when launched.

4. Hold SHIFT and click the close button at the top right.

5. Re-launch the app. It should appear on the "correct" monitor this time.

Holding SHIFT and clicking the close button saves the window position of the app you just closed.

Why does this happen?

Here’s an example situation of what makes an app always launch on the "wrong monitor":

1. You launch an app and drag it to monitor 2.
2. You then launch a full-screen game that changes the resolution of both monitors.

When you launch that game, Windows resets all the current window positions to suit. If you have an app on monitor 2, Windows deems "Okay, this is where this app is supposed to be" and will re-launch it there each time you close and restart it until next boot.

To avoid this situation:

Minimize your open application windows before launching a full-screen game that changes resolution, or purposely run your game in the native resolution for monitor 1 (if the resolution isn’t reset, the window positions aren’t reset either).

Hardware recognition in Linux can come a long, long way. And unless you have a computer that has proprietary hardware (meaning "Windows only" supported), it’s a good bet that if you try out a Linux distribution, everything in your computer box will be supported without issue.

Something that’s always bothered me - as will as many other *nix users - is the lack of multi-monitor support. It’s a pain to set up and even more of a pain to use if you want to use multi-monitor and Compiz (3D effects) at the same time.

I’ll put it to you this way: Let’s say you’ve got a fresh copy of Ubuntu or Linux Mint installed. You installed the Restricted Drivers set to support your nVidia video card. Then you attempt to set up a dual-monitor setup Xinerama style (so both monitors act as one). Chances are you’re not going to get very far by doing it strictly from the GUI. So then you have to manually edit the xorg.conf file but then find out you can’t use Compiz at all whereas before you could.

Is there anything you can do? Yes. You can use Envy. In many distros of Linux Envy is easy to find, download, install and use. If you run a debian-specific distro like Ubuntu or Linux Mint you can acquire it via apt-get, add/remove or software portal (the portal is Mint specific).

Envy adds in a GUI control manager that makes multi-monitor easy to set up that actually works - and gives you Xinerama style - and the ability to get all those cool 3D effects with Compiz too.

Is Envy perfect?

No, far from it. I have 2 major gripes with Envy.

1. It doesn’t tell you when you need to restart X save for one time. What happens is that you’ll modify a setting, exit the control manager and expect it to work. But it doesn’t - not until after a restart of X. I figured this out the hard way.
2. On some distros it will not ask for permission to write to the xorg.conf file. Fortunately you can copy/paste modifications in there, but still you have to know how to do that (i.e. sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, copy/paste/save, etc. etc.)

Even with these gripes, it’s still better than nothing. And even though I wasn’t completely able to escape the command line for the xorg.conf edit, it was darn close.

Soon enough I will be posting a video showing off what Envy can do now. It’s been a while since I used it last and it’s improved quite a bit (even with the gripes I have above).

So if you’re looking for a multi-monitor solution with Linux but can’t seem to get it to work, give Envy a try - it may work for you.