My first LCD

After 4 years of owning a computer, I purchased a monitor for the first time. I had a decent 19" monitor, but I found a great deal on a widescreen LCD and couldn't pass it up. The monitor is a 15.4 inch widescreen by SOYO and it cost only $78. This isn't by any means the greatest LCD in the world, but for the price its very nice.

When it arrived, I couldn't believe how light it was. At first I thought they maybe forgot to put the item in there. It was very easy to setup. The hardest part was removing my old monitor, which weighs over 40 lbs. The downsize in screen wasn't as drastic as I thought it would be. Since its a widescreen it actually is just as wide as my previous monitor.

Things were going well with it until I booted my computer into Linux. I run Ubuntu 6.06 on my machine. Its very nice and works with most hardware without a problem. For some reason it didn't want to setup my new monitor correctly. It would work with 1024x768, but at this resolution images look wrong because they are being stretched. The monitor is a 16:10 aspect ratio and its native resolution is 1280x800. I spend days of Internet searching trying to solve my problem, but did not have any luck.

I knew to solve my problem I needed to create a modeline to place in the xorg.conf file. The problem was I didn't know what this file needed to contain. With a quick Google search I found a site that enables you to plug in simple information on you monitor and it will generate the modeline for you. I tried this but it didn't work. When I ran at 1280x800, the screen would go square and look all funny.

Eventually I found a site that showed how to get the EDID from a monitor. This is the information that is stored in a monitor that describes its cababilities. So, I ran the command:

get-edid | parse-edid

From it I was able to get all the specifics on the monitor. Even the number to put into the modeline. So, I now created my own modeline with all the correct information. I was sure this would solve the problem. I restarted X and it didn't work. Something was still wrong.

The following day it was suggested to me that maybe XGL was causing a problem. When I heard this, I thought about it, and it made sense. I had remembered reading about XGL and when I installed it it did some changed to my video drivers. So, I uninstalled XGL, and then restarted the monitor at 1280x800 and it worked.

I'm very happy with the monitor. It is exactly what I was looking for. It is going to be a second monitor for me once I save up to purchase I nice LCD for my main screen. Now I just have to decide whether to go with another widescreen or not.

SOYO TFT 15.4 inch Widescreen
Model: MT-NI-DYLM1596
Resolution: 1280x800
Contrast Ratio: 600:1
Brightness: 220cd/m2
Pixel Pitch: .258
Connector: D-sub 15 pin

Here is the modeline for the monitor. Just copy and paste into the xorg.conf file
Modeline "1280x800" 68.90 1280 1301 1333 1408 800 804 808 816 -HSync -VSync

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hyperthreading for Gaming - Worth it ...

The Intel Core i7 has been out for over a year now. It without doubt is the fastest processor and it's cost clearly shows this. The question is, is this excellent performance due to its heavily advertised hyperthreading (HT) or is this mostly and advertising gimmick. Lets take a look at the facts and see. An article at vr-zone.com shows that in the games Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2 enabling HT actually causes a reduction in performance. In Crysis not even one frame per second but in Far Cry 2 it 9 frames shy. http://vr-zone.com/articles/does-core-i7-hyper-threading-helps-/6160.html At iXBT Labs, they ran tests disabling HT and Turbo Boost. In numerous cases, the HT either didn't help, offered very little gain or actually caused a drop in performance. In the games tested, only one game actually saw a boost in performance with HT enabled and it was only a 1% gain. The other 7 saw either no change or a slight drop. http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/cpu/ci7-turbo-ht-p1.html Another te
Read more

Galaxy Nexus on Sprint

I recently upgraded my phone on the Sprint network to the Galaxy Nexus. My HTC EVO 4G was still doing well for me but it lacked Ice Cream Sandwich. When looking at phones on Sprints network, I noticed they had the Galaxy Nexus. This is supposed to be a phone from Google with the pure android experience. The Galaxy Nexus was out for close to a year but I liked it better even though it had older hardware. This was largely in part due too having Jelly Bean. Jelly Bean has a super smooth interface and is very fast and fluid on the Galaxy Nexus. The screen is 4.65 inches and is very bright. The phone has no static control buttons but uses the new soft buttons that became an option with ICS. This is nice because you don't have space consumed by static buttons. Instead, they are a part of the screen and can disappear as part of the running application, for instance a movie can consume the entire 1280x720 pixels. It also has a hidden LED for notification that has 3 different colors.
Read more

Quake 4: Linux & ATI

I love using Linux. Earlier this year I purchased Doom 3 for the sole purpose of being able to play a high end game in Linux. I finished that game up a while ago and was once again wanting to have something in Linux. The next game I naturally chose was Quake 4. I love ID software for producing everything needed for these games to run native in Linux, and for that I'm gladly willing to support them so that they keep creating wonderful Linux games. I hope that other company will follow there example. The game arrived and I was very eager to give it a try. Once I installed the game I remembered that a major thing had changed in my computer since I had ran Doom 3. This change was my video card. I had changed from my Nvidia card, known for its quality driver in Linux to an ATI who hasn't had, in previous years, the greatest Linux drivers. Well, I installed the game and tried starting it up. I received then an error stating 'GL_ARB_texture_compression not found', then I would
Read more