Composing .Xmodmap

Show my current key mappings (what X window recognize when I push a key on my keyboard)

$ xmodmap -pke


How to change my key mappings with ~/.Xmodmap file

$ cat ~/.Xmodmap

!keycode 100 = Henkan_Mode NoSymbol Henkan_Mode
!keycode 108 = Alt_R Meta_R Alt_R Meta_R
keycode 100 = Delete NoSymbol Delete
keycode 108 = Hangul NoSymbol Hangul


! lines are comments which were original key mappings.

I'm using a Happy Hacking Professional 2 keyboard with IBus input method in xfce4 on Debian. I wanted to use the unknown key next to HHKB logo as Delete and also wanted to switch input languages (Korean/English) without being disturbed by Alt_R action when I use GUI applications.


After re-running X, it works great!

Installing xfce theme icons cursor

Themes (or Window decorations)
Copy the theme dir into ~/.themes/
(system wide: /usr/local/share/themes/ or /usr/share/themes/)

Cursors
Copy the cursor dir into ~/.icons/
(system wide: /usr/share/icons/)

Icons
Copy the icon dir into ~/.icons/
(system wide: /usr/local/share/icons/ or /usr/share/icons/)

Switch two screens with xorg.conf tweak

I have a monitor on the left and TV - as a monitor - on the right and I was happy with unintended dual monitor by installing nvidia-glx package. Four workspaces of Xfce at first 'were' like 1920x1200 (monitor) + 1920x1080 (TV) so eventually 3840x1200 for each. A couple of days ago I don't know why but I thought maybe I don't need the TV screen, so I ran Xfce menu -> Settings -> Screen and tested the screen setting by disabling and enabling each screen, ... it was a beginning of a disaster.

Workspaces were not 3840x1200 anymore, it became 1920x1200 on TV. It looked like Xfce doesn't involve my monitor screen in its workspaces and I couldn't move application windows from a monitor to TV or vice versa. In advance, panels and desktop icons of Xfce moved TV, (they were on the monitor screen) two screen were switched! I couldn't roll back with Xfce menu -> Settings -> Screen so embarrassed.

Now I think I could tweak some of xml files like displays.xml or xfce4-desktop.xml in ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/ directory (I'm using Xfce 4.8) but I didn't know at that time and my trials with xrandr command created by arandr in ~/.bashrc didn't make me satisfied because the screens were blinked once again after log in Xfce session. They say put the xrandr command in a gdm script of /etc/gdm/ but couldn't make it.

I googled more & solved the problem with /etc/X11/xorg.conf tweak. (There was no xorg.conf in /etc/X11 by default any more and I welcomed it but I had to create xorg.conf to solve this problem.)

I tried with NVIDIA X server settings in Xfce menu -> Settings but it didn't work because the xorg.conf created by that NVIDIA program was using two more "Device" sections for my one GeForce GT 630 card and Xfce seniors say Xfce doesn't support that. So I deleted the nvidia Device sections and modified the first section of xorg.conf, "ServerLayout" section like below by an advice of the following link.


Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "X.org Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" RightOf "Screen1"
        Screen      1  "Screen1" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

http://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=6495

It worked perfectly! The screens are switched with Xfce panels and icons as it was before and expanded workspaces through two monitor screens came back.

Setting up NVIDIA GeForce GT 630

Though I upgraded my Debian from stable release to sid (unstable), a screen resolution was 1600x1200 instead of 1920x1200 which is maximum of my monitor. It looks like a default driver for my graphics card doesn't work good enough.

I downloaded the recent driver from official NVIDIA site and tried to install it but failed because I needed to get a properly configured kernel header.

Googling... and I found what I needed was not a driver from NVIDIA but nvidia-glx package.

$sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx

Slam dunk!

source.list for sid

Debian Linux is released as three versions, stable, testing, unstable. every release has a code-name but unstable is always called as sid, in which has most recently packaged utilities with cutting edge features.

oh... too long, I don't have to explain everything about Debian here.


For sid, I can have only two lines in /etc/apt/source.list file.


deb http://ftp.kr.debian.org/debian/ sid main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.kr.debian.org/debian/ sid main contrib non-free

The source contains the most recent updates including security updates. It's cool.