Re: Xorg cannot use non-native resolutions

["David Banks" <amoebae@gmail.com>]

2008/9/3 T.J. Duchene <tj@genesiswireless.us>:
> It sounds like you aren't actually changing resolutions when you start the
> game up.  Your window manager of choice (Metacity/Gnome, kwin/KDE - whatever
> simply locates the window center screen at the specified resolution.
> As far as I have ever seen or heard, automatic mode switching for full
> screen applications is usually left to the application or windowing
> environment to decide.  I've never seen X automatically switch modes, unless
> it is told to do so, or the mode you ask for fails.   I think the reasoning
> behind this is to protect your hardware.   Granted, this doesn't help much.

The applications I'm using are requesting fullscreen mode.  For
instance, using -f with pingus causes it to request fullscreen.  I can
also write a simple SDL test program to request fullscreen mode at an
arbitrary resolution.  If I then run this with 640x480, a rectangle of
this size is available for drawing the centre of the screen, and the
rest of the screen is black.  Pingus was maybe a pathological example
because frozen-bubble for instance also displays this behaviour of
displaying in a tiny box in the centre, with black borders.

I remember before when I had problems with SDL programs and fullscreen
mode, the problem was always that the right modes weren't defined in
xorg.conf.  But this time they are, and for some reason X doesn't
accept their existence.

> What desktop environment are you using?

I am using GNOME.

Thanks for the response - maybe this will shed a little more light on it...

-- 
David Banks <amoebae@gmail.com>