hannu Posted January 3, 2009 Report Share Posted January 3, 2009 My new laptop is Lenovo T61p, 15.4 monitor, Nvidia Quadro FX 570M and I am trying to run MDV2009. Just about everything works, but I run to this same issue as with several generations of Mandriva in the past. I install Mdv on my laptop, and the installation chooses the highest supported, "native" resolution of the monitor. In my laptop, this is 1920x1200 which is unusable. The "native" resolution is the only widescreen format resolution it shows, the other choices are 5:3 resolutions. The steps down should be 1680x1050, then 1440x900 which I use when running Windows or Ubuntu. I tried to get the Nvidia settings not to force the native res, but it gets ignored. Is there a way to override this in /etc/X11/xorg.conf? My Ubuntu installation on this computer uses the same Nvidia driver, but it allows me to change res to 1440x900. Also, is it possible to toggle between an external monitor and the laptop screen using Fn-F7? Any ideas? Thank you, Hannu Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted January 3, 2009 Report Share Posted January 3, 2009 My new laptop is Lenovo T61p, 15.4 monitor, Nvidia Quadro FX 570M and I am trying to run MDV2009.Just about everything works, but I run to this same issue as with several generations of Mandriva in the past. I install Mdv on my laptop, and the installation chooses the highest supported, "native" resolution of the monitor. In my laptop, this is 1920x1200 which is unusable. The "native" resolution is the only widescreen format resolution it shows, the other choices are 5:3 resolutions. The steps down should be 1680x1050, then 1440x900 which I use when running Windows or Ubuntu. I tried to get the Nvidia settings not to force the native res, but it gets ignored. Is there a way to override this in /etc/X11/xorg.conf? My Ubuntu installation on this computer uses the same Nvidia driver, but it allows me to change res to 1440x900. Also, is it possible to toggle between an external monitor and the laptop screen using Fn-F7? Any ideas? Thank you, Hannu I replied to your other post with some instructions as to how to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Fn+F7 works on my T61, but to get it working I had to edit various files related to acpi and also created a script from various bits and pieces I found on ThinkWiki. The script uses xrandr since have intel X3100 graphics. AFAIK, Nvidia has its own utility to configure external monitor, you could try using it instead. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamw Posted January 3, 2009 Report Share Posted January 3, 2009 If 1920x1200 is the native resolution of the panel, you really should use it (except perhaps for games it's not capable of running smoothly at that high a resolution). Running an LCD display at anything less than its native resolution (or an exact, integer multiple of it) inevitably looks bad, because LCD displays actually have physical 'pixels' - your display has 1920 horizontal elements and 1200 vertical ones. Trying to display 1440 pixels on 1920 LCD elements inevitably results in a loss of quality because you can't do it perfectly - something is going to come out distorted. That's why you should always stick to the native resolution. If you find fonts too small at the native resolution, you should set the display DPI correctly: to find the correct DPI, measure the actual screen area horizontally in inches and divide 1920 into that number, and that's the DPI of your screen. If you're running KDE 4, there isn't an easy way to set an arbitrary DPI. However, you can set it to 120, which would likely be pretty close to correct for a 1920x1200, 15.4" monitor. Run the KDE Control Center (not the Mandriva Control Center, they're different), double click Appearance, single click Fonts, and change the 'Force fonts DPI' box to 120 DPI. I believe KDE 3 is similar to KDE 4. If you're running GNOME, you can set an arbitrary DPI in the GNOME font config tool: System / Preferences / Appearance, click on the Fonts tab, click on Details, and change the Resolution value to whatever you calculated. That should make fonts look the right size on your screen. Note that even if you're in KDE, GTK+ apps - like Firefox - will respect GNOME's setting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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