Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2920 mails)

[Felix Miata <mrmazda@xxxxxx>]

On 2008/01/02 18:31 (GMT-0500) jfweber@xxxxxxxxxxxx apparently typed:

> Did the reinstall and reconfigured the monitor. This time I set the 
> diagonal size to 19" (I measured the screen size and found that it was 
> not really a 20"). Set the resolution to 1152X864 (XGA). That gave me 

1024x768 is XGA
1152x864 is XGA+
1280x960 is QVGA
1280x1024 is SXGA (5:4 rather than 4:3, poorly suited to standard CRTs)
1400x1050 is SXGA+

> 76X67 DPI which while not right was at least better than before when I 
> was getting 80X64 DPI. Output also gave me 1152X768 pixels and 386X290 
> mm.

Significant disparity between vertical and horizontal DPI normally indicates
something needs fixing. If you're running a conventional 4:3 resolution, then
if one DPI is 76, then the other should be as close as possible to 76. 67 is
clearly not close.

> Now when I look at rectangular powerpoint slides and .jpgs they're still 
> squished, but not as much as before. When I checked the pages suggested 
> by Felix the 1" black bar he shows for measurement is about 1 1/4", and 
> the various boxes he shows are not the same size horizontally and 
> vertically, so my monitor and video chip are still not happy working 
> together.

This isn't fundamental to solving your problem, but it's a related issue best
normally solved as a part of running sax2 or as a cleanup of the sax2
results. It may in your case be best left to after you get rectangles
rectangular, after you have a nicely working X and understand how you got it
to be that way.

Modern desktop environments are designed to prefer a display DPI of 96, or
something as close thereto as practical. The lower the DPI, the more granular
desktop objects look. IOW, the higher the DPI, the higher the apparent
quality. In the case of your 20" nominal, 19" actual CRT display, the closest
you can come to 96 is by specifying use of a display resolution of 1400X1050
(SXGA+), which is about 92.1 DPI on your display. The 80 and lower DPI values
we have seen in your Xorg.0.log means your Desktop quality running 1152x864
is suboptimal, and 1024x768 even worse.

If you find yourself running sax2 interactively (e.g. running sax2 with no
command line options), take the opportunity to select 1400x1050. If not, this
can be dealt with after getting rectangular rectangles. Using 1400x1050 on
your display will mean the image that's supposed to be 1" wide will be as
close to actually being 1" wide as possible given your actual physical
display size.

> But given the problem I had trying to switch video drivers I am now very 
> reluctant to try again. I think I'll just live with the slightly 
> squished images until a new driver comes out that is not buggy. Maybe I 
> just had bad luck, and trying "sax2 -r -m 0=i810" again would work out 
> OK, but I'm just not that brave.  :o)

> So many thanks for your help. Sorry that I could not test your theories 
> to find whether both drivers were problematic.

"sax2 -r -m 0=i810" is not my instrucion, and not Jan's instruction, but
SUSE's instruction. You just need to do it if you want progress getting 10.3
working on your i845G. Just don't try it from X. Do it from a virtual console.

As to switching from the intel driver to the i810 driver, it is technically
as simple as substituting one string for the other on the Driver line in
xorg.conf. The problem is that due to the combination of your (somewhat old)
i845G chip and the bugs in the various X components and in the drivers
themselves, other things in xorg.conf probably also need to be changed for
best results. That's one reason why the use of sax2 rather than direct
editing of xorg.conf.
-- 
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God." John 1:1 NIV

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/
-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx