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Re: issues with HP dv5000 laptop



On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 17:58:19 -0200, Adriano Bonat wrote:
> On Jan 14, 2008 5:47 PM, Preston Boyington wrote:
> > I have installed Debian (and Ubuntu) on this laptop several times and I
> > am stumped.  If I use Debian 4.0r2 (currently "stable") I don't have any
> > problems with the font size in gdm, but if I directly install "testing"
> > from a netinst cd or do a dist-upgrade the fonts are gigantic.
> >
> > Imagine the circles that obscure your password while logging into your
> > session in gdm being about the size of ping pong balls.  then when Gnome
> > initially starts the upper and lower bars are about a third of the
> > screen apiece.  After a moment they will go to a normal size, but any
> > font in gdm and its' associated menu entry will be super-sized.  This
> > makes it very difficult to change sessions.

[...]

> I have the same notebook, when I was using Debian with KDM (etch)
> everything was ok, now I was testing Kubuntu and I have always in kdm
> that big fonts problem, after login, everything is ok.
> 
> They say that the solution is specify a DisplaySize in your xorg.conf,
> but for me doesnt work.

Putting the DisplaySize into xorg.conf used to be a good way to ensure
consistent DPI settings, because this was independent of how you started
X, but as far as I can tell this approach does not work reliably anymore
at the moment for both Lenny and Sid. 

Two important commands to figure out what is going on:

xdpyinfo | egrep 'dim|resol'
ps -ef | grep '/usr/bin/X[ ]'

The first one displays the DPI current settings, the second one shows
which parameters were passed to X when it was started - watch out for an
incorrect "-dpi ..." specification here. I have the impression that it
is currently necessary to enforce a correct DPI setting; Xorg seems to
adjust its ideas about the display dimensions based on that.

----------

If you use startx you can try "startx -- -dpi XXX", replacing "XXX" with
your calculated correct DPI value. Also, watch out for this line in
/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc:

exec /usr/bin/X11/X -dpi 100 -nolisten tcp

You can adjust the dpi value here to save you typing when you start X.

----------

If you log in with KDM then you have to edit this line in
/var/run/kdm/kdmrc:

ServerArgsLocal=-nolisten tcp

You can add the -dpi option here:

ServerArgsLocal=-nolisten tcp -dpi XXX

and restart kdm. ("invokde-rc.d kdm restart") In any case, make sure to
keep the "-nolisten tcp" part unless you really know what you are doing.

----------

If you use XDM then you can enforce the DPI setting by editing this line
in /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers:

:0 local /usr/bin/X :0 vt7 -dpi 100 -nolisten tcp

and restarting XDM. ("invokde-rc.d xdm restart")

----------

I don't know GDM too well, unfortunately. I think that this section in
/usr/share/gdm/defaults.conf might be a good place to start:

[server-Standard]
name=Standard server
command=/usr/bin/X -audit 0

I would hope that adding " -dpi XXX" to the "command" line will work.
The file has a few other lines that start with "command=/usr/bin/X", so
it might be necessary to try those as well.

----------

Finally, some applications can still show wrong font sizes even if
Xorg's DPI setting is correct, e.g. iceweasel and openoffice.org. In
that case it might help to run

echo "Xft.dpi: 96" | xrdb -merge

(adjust "96" as necessary)

and to restart the problematic program. If this works it can be made
permanent by adding the line

Xft.dpi: 96

to ~/.Xresources.

-- 
Regards,            | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
          Florian   |


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