On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 6:28 PM, Jan T. Kim jtk@cmp.uea.ac.uk wrote:
Hi All,
I've got two issues mainly concerning hardware:
(1) I've recently bought an Asus W202S display (1680x1050) and connected that to my laptop (Asus X51, ATI Radeon Xpress 200M graphics, running the closed-source ATI X server).
Things basically work, but it takes some sort of "warm-up time" before the picture stably settles in -- initially, areas with a checkerboard raster (e.g. scroll bars of xterm and other Athena GUI applications, also the default meshwork pattern shown by X11 upon startup) are quite blurred. I can fix this by adjusting the "Phase" setting in the display's on-screen menu system, but the phase will drift, resulting in gradual build-up of blur, and it stabilises only after 20 minutes or so.
I wonder whether there might be some Modeline hack or similar to generate a video signal that the display can lock on to reliably, regardless of some drift.
In text (console) mode the display doesn't work ideally either, the display "sees" 1024 x 768 while the laptop's display shows 1280 x 800 (and presumably also sends that through the external monitor interface), so some amount of stuff is cut away from the margins. I've tried everything with the on-screen menus of the display (there isn't very much), to no avail -- so is there anything on the Linux side of this that I could try?
I'd like to think a modern distribution would be pre-configured to use the "Preferred Mode" as reported in the monitor's EDID. Debian based distributions have a package called read-edid. This allows you to run: get-edid | parse-edid which spits out some data including a mode line like this: Mode "1600x1200" # vfreq 60.000Hz, hfreq 75.000kHz DotClock 162.000000 HTimings 1600 1664 1856 2160 VTimings 1200 1201 1204 1250 Flags "+HSync" "+VSync" EndMode
Hope this helps! Tim.