Adam Funk wrote:
Yesterday I shut my Debian box off, swapped in a different graphics card, rebooted, went into a console and changed one line of XF86Config-4 (the Driver line for the card) and did "/etc/init.d/gdm restart". The screen resolution is the same and the monitor is the same. The GDM login screen came up in a slightly larger font and the fonts used by XFCE4, Firefox and the KDE apps that I run all came up differently. Why does just changing the graphics card (and driver) while keeping everything else constant have this effect?
I don't have the explanation, but what you describe is true.You are running a 1 user Debian system. I run a 2 user Debian system with 2 videocards (TNT2 AGP and MX-440 PCI) 2 monitors (Samsung 750s and 753dfx) 2 keyboards and 2 mice.
The display on the TNT2 AGP looks different than the display on the MX-440 (and looks better!) the fonts are slightly different and the screen size is different although there is only one XF86Config-4 that has 2 device entries and the same Nvidia closed source driver. Gdm brings up 2 Xservers that drive both monitors, one slightly later than the other one. The users use Debian independently.
Works very nicely. If I had Matrox cards I would even have vc's on both monitors and now I don't: only the AGP monitor has vc's.
The gory details: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=5379 H