[Gllug] Odd laptop resolutions and Xorg

[Nix]

On 22 Apr 2009, tethys at gmail.com verbalised:

> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 5:24 PM, gunzip <emacs.el at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm thinking of buying one of the new Acer laptops but I note they come in all kinds of new/odd screen resolutions these days, such as 15.6"/1366 x 768 and 12.1"/1280 x 800. Can Xorg on Fedora or Ubuntu handle these accurately or will I need to limit myself to a more standard 15.4"/WXGA?
>
> Yes, it's not a problem. I've been running non-standard resolutions on
> Fedora (and Red Hat before that) for years. In the good old days of
> CRT monitors, you used to be able to get much better resolution and
> refresh rates than the standard VESA modes by coming up with a custom
> modeline. It may be old now, but the information in the XFree86 Video
> Timings HOWTO is still valid and will tell you everything you need to
> know about this.

it's completely unnecessary for LCD displays (and possibly harmful: DVI
displays don't *have* a 'pixel clock' at all and pretending that it has
one just damages image quality). Basically all LCD displays have
accurate EDID information to tell the machine their optimum display
resolution, and X can pick that up automatically.

My 22" Samsung LCD display runs in native 1680x1050 resolution with this
stanza in xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier "Samsung SyncMaster 223BW"
	VendorName "Samsung"
	ModelName  "223BW"
	Gamma      0.5
EndSection

Note the absence of horizontal/vertical refresh rate info, modelines,
and any rubbish like that.

(I tweaked the gamma purely because I disliked the 1.0 gamma the
monitor's EDID recommended: i.e., aesthetics, not correctness. I'm a
darkness hound.)

More generally, these days, your xorg.conf should be *empty* by default:
add bits as you need them. It's optional, not mandatory, and the
defaults should be fine (modulo endless flamewars about the DontZap
option, which some few people would have us believe is critical to
disable as zapping your X server without warning is used by everyone on
Earth on a daily basis, and only a conspiracy of Emacs users would think
otherwise. When several X developers point out that they think the zap
key is harmful and they use vi, they're promptly accused of being
closeted Emacs users! Ridiculous...)
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