never miss an opportunity to really mess things up ...

By basd on May 11, 2010 | In linux, opensuse, -arghhh!!

The Acer project is/was going well, actually. I took the "conservative" approach and did not load all of the extra repositories, just the basic OpSu 11.2 ones. KDE 4.3 running fine, etc. Used "webpin" to track down some programs I wanted that are not in the basic repositories, added those necessary repositories. Everything fine. UNTIL ...

Well, I had connected my 17" external monitor (1280 x 1024). The Acer obligingly shut off the internal monitor and used the external one. The install went fine with everything in 1280 x 1024.

Sooo.... when the actual install offered me via krandr choices of 1024x600 (internal monitor) and 1024 x 768 (external monitor) I was woefully disappointed.

I ran SAX2. Oops.

Well, the oops was not immediately apparent. Because, in fact I successfully set up my external monitor to 1280 x 1024 -- and SAX2 reports I could have resolution up to 1920x1440, but I don't have a monitor to test it on. But ... that seems to have the potential to be very useful.

Then, back to internal monitor!

Aha. The oops. The unfixable oops. No matter what I did, I could only get 800 x 600 stretched to the 1024x600 monitor. Horrible! Sax2 would not fix it.

Not very useful to have all this extra resolution if I can't get it to switch back and forth!

I have renamed the /etc/X11 directory to /etc/X11_old and I'm trying a "repair" run from the OpSu installer. We'll see what happens.

Later: didn't work. I then studied the xrandr wiki. Exited "X" to console session. "X -configure" to create new xorg.conf in /root. Move to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. This put everything back to the status of the original install. (Where one of the further issues is that the cursor disappears on the external screen in 1024x768 mode!)

It appears there is an incompatibility between SAX2 generated xconfig files and the one that xrandr needs. But, SAX2 and xrandr seem to be using different databases or something. So, I can get a VESA 1280x1024 (no effects) on my external monitor OR I can get normal operations. Weird.

Oh, by the way, unlike my Gateway, the Acer netbook handles 3d compositing just fine in the normal mode.

I should note that all of this is handled by an hotkey in Windows7. The "unified" mode runs the same as in linux, 800x600. The external only mode runs in 1280x1024 (at least on my 1280x1024 external monitor).