[SGVLUG] Re: Video

[Dustin Laurence]

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 10:30:40PM -0700, I wrote:

> Would you know how to go about elevating the monitor display from what
> was called VGA to SVGA or above?
> 
> I'm running Fedora Core 5, and the current setting is; 800 x 600 with an
> option to go to; 640 x 480.
> 
> I bought a low end nVidia card through eBay 
> (and got burned mostly, bad fan) and the improved video card switch had
> absolutely no effect to elevate the display settings.
> 
> The monitor is a; KDS which is not listed in the LINUX usable monitor
> table. I don't know if I should get another monitor or a video driver
> card, or both. 

My guess is that you have a bare install of FC and have not touched the
video settings at all.  Generally X is installed with a generic VESA
driver that "works" for any card, but as a lowest-common-denominator
driver can't take advantage of any capabilities that the worst card sold
in the last ten or twenty years or something didn't have.  Changing the
card doesn't help because X is using the same driver.

What you need to do is either change X to the Free 'nv' driver, which
should already be installed on your system, or install the proprietary
'nvidia' driver.  You might as well just tell it to use the 'nv' driver
first so you get full resolution--the main difference for you between
the drivers is just that the 'nv' driver can't do hardware 3D
acceleration.

I can probably tell you how to change the driver setting by hand--FC
probably has some nice graphical tool but I don't happen to know what it
would be.  This would be a good question to ask the SGVLUG list (I
assume this is how you got my email), since plenty of people there run
FC, but if you want to do it by hand, this is how to do it.  Assuming I
remember correctly.

I am going to Cc: the list since someone else is probably wondering the
same thing and this is tedious to write out.

First, this is what you need to do to change the driver only; if you are
going to set your monitor up properly then you can do them at the same
time, as I describe later.  But I suggest you do this anyway just for
the experience of looking at xorg.conf; it's not that bad as config
files go.

Generally what you need to do is look in your X configuration file,
which is probably /etc/X11/xorg.conf (but I could be wrong, I don't have
a machine running FC right now).  As root, make a backup of this file
(I use something like xorg.conf.orig for the original and the use '.NN'
for the NNth backup I have made if I keep editing it) and then look
through that file (in an editor) for the "Device" section.  In that
section there should be a like that looks something like

    Driver "vesa"

You want it to read

    Driver "nv"

Then restart X (the easy way is to just reboot.  If X starts, fine, you
probably have a lot more resolution choices available.  If not, well,
you can log in at a text console and edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to fix
whatever went wrong.  At worst, you can restore the backup.

Of course you still need to tell X about your monitor to get things
right.  First you need stats for it--I've always been able to find those
numbers with Google.  There must be numbers on it somewhere besides
'KDS'; Google on those numbers and you'll probably find a page that has
some specs.  The ones you care about are the horizontal and vertical
refresh rates.

Again, there is some nice graphical tool to do this, but you'll have to
ask on the list how FC prefers it done.  The "hard way" is to make sure
you have a backup of xorg.conf, then run the program 'xorgconfig' as
root.  What it will do is ask you a lot of questions through a very bad
text interface (suitable for the state of things in, oh, the '70s, if
the programmer were really malicious) and then write a new xorg.conf for
you (thus the reason you really must have a backup first).  Somewhere
among the confusing questions you can enter the driver and refresh
rates.

Hmm, I just looked, and 'xorgcfg' is the graphical tool.  You'll
probably like that much better since you already have X working
minimially.  I wouldn't call it nice exactly, and it doesn't appear to
follow any human interface guidelines from this planet, but for most
people it is better than xorgconfig.  What you want to do is start it up
*as root* and click on the video card and monitor buttons and change the
driver and monitor settings there.

Again, the interface is apparently designed to be intuitive to small
green aliens from the Crab nebula, but it works.  You might want to run
it *not* as root first to get a feel for it--you won't be able to save a
new configuration as your own user, but that's the whole point of doing
a safe test.

Dustin
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