HUGE letters on GDM [solved]

[theYinYeti]

It's a Packard Bell laptop. It used to run Debian 3, and was updated, upgraded, and so on… until late 2008, early 2009 (I don't remember), after a very big upgrade (to Deb.4?), when suddenly all letters on GDM screen were huge. But after login, all was fine, so I did nothing until summer came.

 

I played a bit with config files, and searched Internet (nothing found…). As I could not find any cure to this problem, I decided to remove Debian, and install Mandriva 2009.1 instead.

To my great surprise, Mandriva installation screens suffered the same huge letters, but I finally managed to get Mandriva installed (using One IIRC, thus bypassing those screens).

 

Seeing the problem occured on install screens, I expected the GDM screen to behave the same, and of course it did. So the problem clearly is not related to Debian but rather to the hardware. I suspect the graphics chip is reporting a wrong DPI value, and some sort of auto-configuration takes place using this value, until the desktop is displayed, where Gnome forces a fixed (and approximately good) value of 96dpi.

 

Can anyone help me set the correct character size on GDM?

 

Yves.

Edited September 4, 2009 by theYinYeti

[Greg2]

I'm using KDM, so this is from memory and may not be accurate. :)

 

Look in the /usr/share/gdm/themes/your-theme-name/your-theme-name.xml file for the font types and sizes, then edit it with your preferences. Replace your-theme-name with the theme you're using.

 

There should also be a gui way to do this, but I can't remember.

[theYinYeti]

Thank you, I'll have a look.

 

Yves.

[theYinYeti]

To get an overall correct result, I did the following change.

In gdmsetup, under the “Security†tab, there's a button for opening an advanced configuration panel for the X server. In there, for both the Standard and the Chooser servers, I added “ -dpi 96†to the command-line.

 

Then (as root), “service dm restartâ€, and all is fine :)

 

Yves.