On Thursday 12 June 2003 17:31, Barry Samuels wrote:

When X is started (I have changed XF86Config-4 appropriately) the image will sometimes appear perfectly positioned but at other times the right-hand edge of the image appears in the centre of the screen with the rest disappearing off the left edge and the image looks a little distorted. If I then switch to a text console and back to the graphics console the image is displayed correctly.

Pure guesswork here but,

The monitor probably samples the horizontal and vertical refresh rates in order to determine how to fill the screen properly. It maybe that if X is starting at a certain time during this supposed sampling then the monitor determines incorrect information. and messes up the timing in the analog signal.

By changing to a tty and back again you are changing resolution and/or refresh intervals forcing the monitor to sample again (this time getting it right)

Have you set the HorizSync and VertRefresh rates in your config file to those specified by the monitor manufacturer ? It does not matter if the recommended settings seem quite low (i.e. 60Hz) as unlike CRT's this is not the refresh you actually see, just the timing interval in the video signal.

Other than that it could be a faulty unit or maybe there is a setting somewhere in the on-screen config on the monitor to tell it not to bother working out the image position/size and let you do it manually.

(however the last thing is quite unlikely as most TFT's don't need the manual size adjustments that CRT's do, the display area on a TFT is a definite thing)

As far as I can work out Laptops should never suffer this because the video is sent to the display as a digital signal (similar to the DVI or similar output on high end video cards) with a fixed clock rate (as opposed to the variable timings present in the analog VGA signal)

As I say pure guesswork here, but it might be worth a shot.