Need help with widescreen laptop

[coverup]

I have been fighting with blurry fonts on my new 14.1" laptop for quite some time now, and cannot figure out how to fix them despite I tried all possible combinations of subpixel hinting, resolutions tweaks, and dpi settings. To briefly summarise my findings, there are possibly two reasons: (1) intel drivers suck, and (2) wide screens are just a deception.

 

As for the reason 1, it suffice to say, that the intel driver seems to overturn all standard X options such as DisplaySize and DPI settings. With no magic in the world I can force my laptop to switch to the 96dpi resolution. Xrandr and xdpyinfo would report 96dpi, but in fact it is 120dpi - you can change it in gnome, or via xrandr as much as you like, but the screen fonts remain of the same size.

 

As for reason 2, I tried the following experiment. I checked how firefox displays the same page on the my 1440x900 widescreen and an older 1400x1050 laptop. The page does not have any stylesheets, and both laptops were setup to use the same arial 15 font. The firefox was maximized on both displays, and you would expect longer lines on the 1440x900 screen, because it is about 1.5cm and 40 pixels longer. To my surprise, both screens looked exactly the same, except for letters on the 1440x900 screen looked wider, and therefore blurrier (due to subpixel hinting, I presume).

 

My question now is whether it is possible to make the stinky intel driver not to poll the built-in EDID, and use my external 1280x1024 monitor instead?

[LuisC-SM]

take a look at this thread

 

http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=...&highlight=

 

Cheers

 

Luis

[coverup]

Thanks for the reply. I followed the instructions and have patched those libraries. It did make a significant improvement to how the fonts look, even though the patches disabled subpixel hinting. I still find that antialiasing works strangely, as sometimes long lines of text on the screen are stretched a bit more than they are stretched on my old 3:4 laptop.