fuzzy fonts and altered resolution

[mimosa]

I've just spent a few days with everything too large and lacking sharpness, as though I were wearing my wife's glasses. Only my Ratpoison/Xmonad install was affected, Openbox Beta on the same machine remained fine.

This morning when I booted the machine it was back to normal.

The only thing I can think of that might have provoked this episode was that I ran pkgtool --> Setup --> services, and it's not transparent what that does. But the display isn't a service, is it?

I mention this because a few people have posted about persistent problems with fonts, and maybe that's what they were seeing. It reminded me of my attempts to install Slackware and Arch, where configuring the display is left as an exercise for the user And in both cases, it looked terrible, and doing something about it was beyond my knowledge; otherwise I might have spent longer playing with them.

[mimosa]

... and this morning, it's haywire again. I think this has graduated to being a problem!

Unfortunately I know nothing about configuring the display, partly because I've never had any trouble with Salix before.

Let me try and describe what I see:

Text is bigger and less sharp, both in the terminal and the browser

Everything is bigger, for instance this box I'm typing into

My desktop background is an image occupying the whole width of the screen and about half the height, so it's displayed with black strips above and below. Those strips are wider, and the image is narrower. The command in my ratpoison.rc to display the image is exec feh --bg-max ~/foo.jpg Not sure if anything is being cropped at the sides, but I don't think so.

The aspect ratio doesn't look right for video.

Here are a couple ofscreenshots:

http://postimage.org/image/8qxz1p3ov/
http://postimage.org/image/70ey07m5r/

[gapan]

I can't see anything wrong with those screenshots.

Running pkgtool/setup/services, runs the /var/log/setup/setup.services script. Nothing in there should make a difference with xorg I think. Maybe you also created a xorg.conf by mistake somewhere?

[mimosa]

I can't see anything wrong with those screenshots.

Well I liked the look of everything a lot better the way it was yesterday

... but maybe I just need to adjust my glasses or something like that.

I agree that it's difficult to see how I might have broken or even altered the config.

[thenktor]

Are you using the native monitor resolution? Using a smaller resolution results in blurred screens.

[mimosa]

Today I booted up my machine and it's crisp and correct. Here are two screenshots similar to yesterday's to show the difference, and also a third of the desktop background, which yesterday had much wider black strips above and below. This looks like the correct proportion to me. The image is scanned from a drawing of where I live and more to the point, I have the original drawing. I don't think anything was cropped off the sides yesterday, it was just squashed vertically.

I don't know what I can be doing to provoke these changes. The only thing out of the ordinary is I've been switching between Ratpoison and Xmonad, which obviously have different .xinitrc files. But nothing in there should do anything to the display config, should it? Details of the setup can be found in a recent post on the Misc board.

@ Thenktor How do I find out? I'm not even sure what the monitor's resolution is. But I bet this is "native" and yesterday's was not

http://postimage.org/image/m1hp0ultb/
http://postimage.org/image/qpxow1azz/
http://postimage.org/image/g5nrdg6i7/

[gapan]

I still can't see what the problem is.

You can type xrandr in a terminal to see you current monitor resolution.

[thenktor]

Your old screenshots are in 1024x768 resolution, your new ones are 1600x900. I bet you are using the wrong resolution
Is your monitor turned on when X starts?

[mimosa]

Is your monitor turned on when X starts?

Thenktor, I think you've hit the nail on the head. I'll test to confirm, but I bet I get the correct resolution if it's on

still can't see what the problem is.

I just looked at the images from yesterday and they look fine - but they are smaller. I think the monitor is stretching them to fit, and then they look terrible. That's why my desktop background is squashed vertically; and it takes up more of the screen at the correct resolution because that is wider, and closer to the proportions of the image.

[thenktor]

I just looked at the images from yesterday and they look fine - but they are smaller. I think the monitor is stretching them to fit, and then they look terrible.

That's what I'm talking about