I'm temporarily stuck with using a netbook, so for my sanity and eye-sight I want to use an external monitor. Harddrake reports that the netbook uses an Intel N10 Family Integrated Graphics Controller, saying that it is an Intel 810 or later. I'm using Mageia Cauldron, and KDE is 4.8.2-2.

The built-in graphics display is 1280 x 720 @ 60.4Hz.
The external monitor is currently set to 1024 x 768 @ 60 Hz.

That should be set at 1280 x 1024 @ 60Hz. As a consequence, some 20% of my screen is not shown on the external monitor, a real PITA.

Neither Mageia Control Center nor System Settings allow me to change this - it seems that systemsettings thinks that 1024x768 is the best the monitor can do. In the old days I have needed to construct an xorg.conf section to deal with difficult monitors, but when I tried this X didn't start at all, so I assume I didn't get it quite right.

I hate to say "Windows does this beautifully" but it does - so I take that as suggesting that the monitor is in fact giving out the correct information to the system. Any help/suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

Anne

not that it will work but what about krandrtray

google01103 wrote:not that it will work but what about krandrtray

That's the package name I couldn't remember. Sadly it seems to be missing from Mageia, so I'd better ask there. Thanks for the prompt. If I find the package I'll report back on whether it succeeds. I'm pretty sure I did achieve this once, some long time ago.

what about the cli version xrandr, is it available?

Hmm - found krandrtray - and it opens the dialog that I see in systemsettings, so no help there.

Anne

if your preferred resolution isn't detected then you'll need to add it (or so say'ith Google)

see the "Adding undetected resolutions" section of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution

google01103 wrote:if your preferred resolution isn't detected then you'll need to add it (or so say'ith Google)

see the "Adding undetected resolutions" section of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution

That is 100% better than any of the page I had found - I strongly recommend it to anyone needing to understand xrandr better. I now have a perfect display and am constructing an /.xprofile to make it persistant. (I had used the excellent gtf many years ago, but once again, couldn't remember the name.) This is how the sequence went for me:

$ which gtf
/usr/bin/gtf #so it's already installed

$ gtf 1280 1024 60

# 1280x1024 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 63.60 kHz; pclk: 108.88 MHz
Modeline "1280x1024_60.00" 108.88 1280 1360 1496 1712 1024 1025 1028 1060 -HSync +Vsync

$ xrandr --newmode "1280x1024_60.00" 108.88 1280 1360 1496 1712 1024 1025 1028 1060 -HSync +Vsync
$ xrandr --addmode VGA1 1280x1024_60.00
$ xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1280x1024_60.00

$ xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 1024, maximum 4096 x 4096
LVDS1 connected 1280x720+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 222mm x 125mm
1280x720 60.4*+
800x600 60.3 56.2
640x480 59.9
VGA1 connected 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
1024x768 60.0
800x600 60.3 56.2
848x480 60.0
640x480 59.9
1280x1024_60.00 60.0*

This will make a huge difference to my working comfort. Thanks for the pointers.

We should remind anyone following this that it is essential to have the specs of the monitor to hand - it's possible to irrepairably damage the monitor by using inappropriate settings.

Unfortunately, at startup, KDE doesn't look for ~/.xprofile. This needs, I think, to be somewhere in the ~/.KDE(4)/Autostart directory. It could be ~/.KDE(4)/env, but I think that is more for setting environmental variable. Could be wrong

I tried putting the three xrandr commands into ~/.KDE4/Autostart/.xinitrc. That hasn't worked either. I can manage, manually running them, but it's an inelegant solution, so any better ideas?

why not try it in ~/.KDE(4)/env / ? as this is 'pre-KDE', is that too early? elegance is not important for temporary solutions

what about ~/.config/autostart/, I looked at my autostart programs and that's where the kcm module places them (leaving me to wonder if the autostart folder is still used, or is just not the preferred locale)

Tried both - neither of them work. This is silly. There has to be a way.

Do they work when you place them in a script and run the script in Konsole or only when run individually ? What if you put a small sleep interval between commands, maybe one is running before the previous has fully taken effect (yeah, just throwing thing out there)

In order for either ~/.kde4/env/ or ~/.kde4/Autostart to work - the file must have executable permissions.
In addition, it must not be hidden, and for shell scripts, they must have the .sh extension.

I would also recommend including an appropriate shebang line at the start of the scripts.
(Note that ~/.kde4/ may need to be substituted, check the output of kde4-config --localprefix for the correct directory).

There has been a major outage in this area all day, so I've only just seen this. In fact that's more or less what I've done - and it's working. I simply made the commands into an executable script and put them into ~/.kde4/Autostart. I didn't use a shebang line, though. I've never really understand when you do and don't need one.

Come to think of it, I had originally given it a hidden name, which it now doesn't have. Anyway, the result is a good one. Thanks to you both.