Job Satisfaction

I was given a task to set up the video drivers on a linux laptop the other day so that it would work with the school's projectors, after a couple co-workers had a go at it but it still wasn't quite working. My task was to reset the drivers to the defaults.

Seriously, this is a 30 second task.

But then I decided to make sure and actually test it on a projector. It was not working.

So, I tweaked the settings and I swapped out drivers and I shuffled things around and downloaded specs to find the horizontal and vertical refresh rates for the projector and tweaked the settings some more.

I was at it until 1am, when I finally got it working 100%. It was tricky to work though, because the regular desktop resolution was different from the projector resolution (also, different aspect ratios). When you went to change the resolution, it would go to the defaults for the projector, so you'd only have a little panning window of the desktop. BUT, if you set the resolution on the projector ONLY (with the laptop screen off), it would set the resolution on both (and automatically turn the laptop screen back on). So, fn-F4, fn-F4, set resolution. Three steps.

I finally go home and go to bed and forget to set the alarm because I was so tired. I oversleep, and when I finally do get up and check my e-mail, I find a message from my boss:

"Had a panning problem, reset to vesa drivers."

:-/