On Sunday 02 November 2008 12:26, William L. Maltby wrote:
On Sat, 2008-11-01 at 22:08 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
Basically, what I did was to run system-config-display to reconfigure for the new monitor and resolution. All goes well, but after X restarts, I see a strange picture: the resolution indeed goes to 1680x1050 as is supposed to, but is squeezed/shrinked/scaled horizontally to match a 4:3 aspect ratio, leaving two (unequal) black bands on the left and right side of the monitor.
This sounds like the "Modes" line in the "Subsection Display" may not have the right settings. The manual/CD for the monitor should have the right settings. I would compare those against what the configuration process generated and manually edit if needed. Why the difference between FC4 and CentOS, I can't guess.
Comparing the CentOS and Fedora Xorg.0.log I found that the actual modelines are just slightly different. Assuming that this difference might actually be important, I took the known-to-work modeline from Fedora's Xorg.0.log, copy-paste it in CentOS xorg.conf and forcing X to use that. But the result is the same.
I will also try to find modeline data in the monitor manual, but I doubt that it is not going to be any different than DDC values that X autodetects.
I don't have the URL, but some time ago I googled and found a very detailed description of the modes, their effects, "blanking" (the "black bands") and the relationship of all those. Go googling if you think if might help.
I'll look into that, to educate myself about modelines beyond the man page. But I have a feeling this problem is not related to modelines.
Btw, this is on an nVidia GeForce 4 using the default nv driver. The vesa driver doesn't support widescreen resolutions, while nvidia binary driver crashes X completely on start (but this is a known motherboard problem common to FC4 as well).
Have you tried the nvidia drivers from rpmforge? It has drivers for both the older and newer nVidia cards, all ready for CentOS. I'm using the older driver now (standard CRT though, not a newer LCD/TFT wide-aspect screen) and it works flawlessly.
Yes, I have tried the package from rpmforge, but it behaves the same way. But the problem with binary drivers is that my motherboard has a bug in the bios which autodetects and forces AGP to 8X, which in turn doesn't work for some reason. This is the same for both Fedora and CentOS, and I gave up on 3d acceleration on this hardware a long time ago. But this resolution problem is related to nv driver, present in CentOS while absent in Fedora. Therefore I believe it is unrelated to hardware issues.
Thanks for the help!
Best, :-) Marko