Replacing windows XP at home.

[Matthew Seaman]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 08:56:33AM -0700, Joshua Lewis wrote:

>                                                             Other then
>    personal preference. I have been using enlightenment for about a week
>    and perhaps it is something I did but my resolution is stuck at
>    1600x1280 at 65Hz. My monitor keeps getting mad at me and telling me
>    that is not the recommended solution. I have been trying to figure out
>    how to change it and I have updated the xorg.conf as the handbook says
>    but it still defaults. Unless anyone has an idea why I am going to
>    switch to fluxbox and see how that feels.

Display resolution is independant of the window manager you choose.
As you say, you've looked at xorg.conf, and that's the right place
to go to fix this problem.

The automatic X -config stuff tends to get you the largest screen
real-estate that X thinks your graphics card and monitor are capable
of supporting.  In the past that often meant running at a lower colour
depth (which tends not to be a problem nowadays when 64MB is
considered a small quantity of graphics memory) or running at a lower
refresh rate (much more likely to be a problem).

In order to override the resolution presented to you, you can edit the
last section in xorg.conf, the "Screen" section.  There's two things
you can add to this section that help.  First you can force the colour
depth of the monitor to 24bits.  Your graphics card might support
32bits, but that isn't actually any higher colour resolution than
24bits -- the extra 8bits is used for fancy stuff like z-buffering or
alpha (transparency).  Secondly, you can tell X what your preferred
screen resolution is.  On my system, I like to run at 1600x1200.  The
monitor will do 1920x1440 but it's not really a supported resolution
according to the manufacturers and the low refresh rate is annoying.
So I have the following in my xorg.conf:

    Section "Screen"
            Identifier "Screen0"
            Device     "Card0"
            Monitor    "Monitor0"
            DefaultDepth 24
            SubSection "Display"
                    Viewport   0 0
                    Depth     1
                    Modes     "1600x1200" "1920x1440" "1280x1024" "1152x864"
            EndSubSection
            SubSection "Display"
                    Viewport   0 0
                    Depth     4
                    Modes     "1600x1200" "1920x1440" "1280x1024" "1152x864"
            EndSubSection
            SubSection "Display"
                    Viewport   0 0
                    Depth     8
                    Modes     "1600x1200" "1920x1440" "1280x1024" "1152x864"
            EndSubSection
            SubSection "Display"
                    Viewport   0 0
                    Depth     15
                    Modes     "1600x1200" "1920x1440" "1280x1024" "1152x864"
            EndSubSection
            SubSection "Display"
                    Viewport   0 0
                    Depth     16
                    Modes     "1600x1200" "1920x1440" "1280x1024" "1152x864"
            EndSubSection
            SubSection "Display"
                    Viewport   0 0
                    Depth     24
                    Modes     "1600x1200" "1920x1440" "1280x1024" "1152x864"
            EndSubSection
    EndSection
 
ie. add the 'DefaultDepth 24' and 'Modes ...' lines.  The modes lines
give alternate resolutions that you can cycle through using
Ctrl-Alt-KP_Plus or Ctrl-Alt-KP_Minus (ie + or - from the numeric
keypad, not the ones on the top row of the main set of keys).

Also, look at /var/log/Xorg.N.log which will tell you what modes your
system thinks are workable, even if you put something a little too
ambitious in the config file.

	  Cheers,

	  Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       7 Priory Courtyard
                                                      Flat 3
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Ramsgate
                                                      Kent, CT11 9PW
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