Tag Archives: X

Fixing HP EliteBook ambient button

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The button that is supposed to toggle the ambient light sensor on HP EliteBooks 8440p and 8460p per default switches off the touch pad. That is because Fn+F11 (scancode 0x33), which is the ambient light button, is incorrectly mapped to KEY_TOUCHPAD_OFF (keycode 193) in kernel. To remap the scancode to another keycode, you can use setkeycodes. An appropriate choice for… Read more »

KDE multi-monitor display settings are lost on logout

There are quite a few bug reports on the kde bug tracking system about kde losing display settings on logout (e.g. Bug 183143). But since this problem has been present for a couple of years and is still existing in the latest version of KDE (i.e. 4.8.5 at this writing), here’s a workaround: Add a parameter called StartupCommands to the… Read more »

Starting a minimal X

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Just because I always forget and the parameters are somewhat non-trivial, here’s how you start an xterm inside X: Of course, the display name :0 is usually used by default, so you may need to use another one (:1 etc.) if you get an error like “Server is already active for display 0“. You can also select a different virtual… Read more »

Granting access to X server with xhost

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Every X server internally manages an ACL (Access Control List) of those hosts, that are allowed to connect. The server only authorizes connections from X clients, whose host is on that list and rejects access to all others. The xhost program is used to add or revert access to the X server for specified hosts. It’s also possible to specify… Read more »

Staring X applications through an ssh tunnel

If you encounter the problem of being unable to start an X application through an ssh-tunnel and run into an error message similar to or you should check that you used ssh -X[…] to enable X11 forwarding when connecting to the server that the xauth-package is installed correctly on your server xauth is used to edit and display the authorization… Read more »