Can anyone help with how to do this?

The problem is that my new monitor is 2K, so it has a native resolution of 2560x1440. My onboard graphics seems only to support 2048 x 1280, so that's what I am using it at. Yes, I do plan on getting a proper graphics card soon!

However, even with it running at 2048 x 1280, the result is that the fonts and layout is a lot too small for comfort. Taking the resolution down does work, but it defeats the object of having bought a 2K monitor in the first place, and it apparently lowers quality, particularly of text, so I don't want to do that as a permanent solution .

Apparently the correct solution is to use xrandr to set the scale factor to a whole number, in this case probably 2, and to use panning in some way so that the desktop display, being smaller than the display as configured, acts as a sort of moveable window into it.

I have read the man pages on xrandr, and think I know what to do, but the problem is, it seems that if you get this wrong, your monitor becomes unusable. Maybe this is just alarm over nothing? Don't know.

Has anyone actually done this successfully? Or have you found any other solution to the high DPI problem?

Here is what my xrandr looks like in case that helps

$ xrandr -q Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2048 x 1280, maximum 8192 x 8192 VGA-1 disconnected primary (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) HDMI-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) HDMI-2 connected 2048x1280+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 597mm x 336mm 2560x1080 60.00 59.94 59.98 2048x1280 59.99* 1920x1200 59.95

..... and so on......

2560 x 1080 isn't satisfactory because it elongates everything. I suppose a proper graphics card will enable 2560 x 1440. But that will only make the problem worse unless 'scale' and 'panning' can be used to fix it. I'm using fluxbox on Debian by the way so I don't have the Gnome or KDE GUI tools.

Peter