High resolution troubles
Last week I’ve re-installed my Debian-box, and well, it just feels great using KDE & Co again. I like OS X, it’s sexy and everything and I don’t want to miss the last months (ouch!), but it’s just no match for a properly set-up Debian with KDE on top. Which brings me to the things other operating systems are way more comfortable in:
- Removeable media. While this seems to work pretty good using the Gnome-Volume-Manager, KDE lacks proper mechanisms. In fact, Linux lacks proper mechanisms, GVM is just a good workaround. Maybe I’ll go for GVM for the time being.
- Wireless networking. It’s still a pain in the ass to set-up. Period.
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Configuring X. So I’ve had my Dell 2405FPW connected to my ATI X800 XT PE, used X.Org’s ATI/Radeon-driver and everything seemed pretty nice. Of course I headed for ATI’s proprietary drivers to unleash the full potential of my graphic board. At least I thought so.
I downloaded the new installer and was pretty amazed of the ease-of-use. Just a few clicks and I had a couple of Debian packages. I installed the ones I needed, edited my xorg.conf and tara!, just couldn’t get a resolution of 1920x1200px, 1280x1024px was the max. After searching around a little bit, I found that I’d have to use modelines. Using get-edid it was pretty simple to make the appropriate entry to my xorg.conf. After restarting X, it came up with the desired resolution. (Note: unlike the Nvidia drivers, ATI’s need the option VideoOverlay enabled for XV to work.) The fonts have been way to big but that was fixed in seconds by simply adjusting them using kcontrol.
So far so good, direct rendering was enabled and glxgears spat out 30kfps and I went on testing video using mplayer and xine.
Unfortunately, they both screwed up the aspect ratio by stretching the picture. A friendly guy at #ati@freenode told me that mplayer needs the parameter monitoraspect set correctly (in my case 16:10 ) and xine uses xorg’s DisplaySize. Both players showed the correct aspect ratio after those changes, the only problem was that I had to re-adjust my fonts to sizes >32(!) to be readable. Checking the logs I found out why: the dpi have been set to 28x28dpi. Solution: just give DisplaySize in mm, not in pixels *cough*. After re-re-adjusting the fonts, the DFP and VGA-card seem to cooperate properly at least.
Notice something? Jepp, the only (well, mostly) issues I have with GNU/Linux are hardware-related. But that’s the fault of companies refusing to provide proper drivers or at least specifications so drivers can be written without having to reverse-engineer every single bit.