I am if not religious then at least passionate about KDE and shun and stay away from Gnome. My personal favourite D is Mandriva which IMO pulls of an excellent KDE4.1.2 integration.Nonetheless, there are a few glaring warts, and one of the most annoying is with setting display resolution and refresh rate.

Simply put, there is no GOOD way of doing this in MCC or drakx11 (I think it is called) for which MCC's display settings is a GUI front-end, for easily setting these critical aspects. And I am sad to say that here, Gnome gets it right. This is what we need and want:



* A selector for RESOLUTION
* A selector for REFRESH RATE
* A selector for SCREEN ORIENTATION

These options are also available in Windows' Display Settings (though a bit more clumsy - you have to enter "advanced->adapter" iirc to specify refresh rate). Now, I'm not sure if this is something that KDE or the D should handle, but a standardised KDE tool for this would we justified given that the X11 way is unsafe and overly technical for the new user base that is increasingly coming to Linux.

One additional feature would be an override for refresh rates allowing you to select rates you know works but aren't ordinarily listed in the pull-down. Possibly an "advanced" tick-box "allow unsafe refresh rates" or something.

Tool already exists in KDE 4.1, please check System Settings > Display > Size & Orientation. i do not use multiple displays with it, but it looks like the tool for the job.

bcooksley wrote:Tool already exists in KDE 4.1, please check System Settings > Display > Size & Orientation. i do not use multiple displays with it, but it looks like the tool for the job.

On my Mandriva install I do not have the exact path you suggest, so I assume you mean the "graphical server set up", i.e. the X-server settings? This looks like and has the options

Code: Select all

Graphcs card    [ATI Radeon]
Monitor         [1280x1024 @ 76hz]
Resolution      [1280x1024 24bpp]
Test
Options


Note that the refresh rate is an aspect of the monitor and not the adapter (graphics card). Also note that you CAN'T set your display refresh rate directly, you have to go through a custom monitor where you specify the horizontal and vertical refresh rate RANGES supported by your monitor or select a preset combination (as I have done above, the "1280x1024 @ 76" is a selectable preset, and does not reflect the actual capabilities of my monitor or the mode I wish to use). That is you CAN'T select a normal 4-tuple display setting .

Allow me to explain the problem, because it IS a problem, precisely if somewhat verbosely:

The reason the GNOME screen does it correct is because it represents all the data and in a natural way. When we obtain and list the hardware capabilities of graphic adapters we get them in lists of modes where each mode is quad tuple . Also, when we requests a screen mode we usually do this in the same format. This is the format you set in the GNOME panel I linked to, in Windows, and f.i. in most video games config.

The X11 config tools on the other hand, which seems to be what we currently have to use to set screen mode, represents data in a way not natural for manipulating the display adapter. It seems to require you to specify ranges of vertical and horizontal refresh rates (the limits of the monitor? the adapter? Unless you know monitor architecture it is not clear), and in a separate screen set a X/Y/BPP mode. There is no connection between the vertical refresh rate ranges (for the monitor?) and the screen mode (adapter), in fact you apparently CAN'T directly set the refresh rate for your current screen mode? Further, there are lists of screen modes in the xorg.conf file. These seemingly contain only a sub-set of the adapter's modes, and some that are NOT supported by the adapter(!). And, as usual, changing anything in xorg.conf risks wrecking your system.

I think you see my points:

(1) The X11 config tools are unnatural and seems to vacillate between representing the monitor and the display adapter, when it should let you fully manipulate the adapter and by default restrict you to the constraints set by the monitor (unless overridden).

(2) The current auto-detection seems flaky at best, and though it might be improved, it may never be perfect, why we must be able to specify all options manually (under Caveat Emptor, as usual).


So, what is selecting a screen mode?

Point 1: A screen mode is the combination width, height, colour depth and refresh rate. Your GRAPHICS ADAPTER (the actual gfx card) specifies these,

Point 2: When manipulating the screen mode users do NOT want to specify monitor ranges and go through several abstract menus not seemingly directly related to the screen mode.

Point 3: Setting a screen mode IS selecting a combination of w/h/bpp/hz, either as one item from a list, or by combining them from several lists located together, obviously and logically belonging together.


The core of the problem is that X handles display settings, which includes both monitor and graphics adapter. The X11 tools therefore are confused as to what the user need or wants to do and mix up monitor and adapter settings, and prohibits users from explicitly selecting the screen mode. We set up monitors once or very seldom, but change screen mode relatively frequently. The X11 tools disassociate related aspects. The X11 tools prohibits you from directly and explicitly setting and controlling your current screen mode by disallowing you to specify the refresh rate / selecting the actual display mode.

I was not referring to the mandriva specific "graphical server setup" which is just drakx11.

That path will not exist in your menu. you should find an application entitled "System settings" or "Personal settings".
You will find two tabs: General & Advanced. ensure "General" is selected. there should be a category called "Computer Administration" under there you will find "Display" that is the KDE Configuration Module for this task.

Alternatively, you can execute: "kcmshell4 display" from konsole.

This tool is like that Gnome tool, it is not a X configuration utility ( doesn't require root anyway which X configuration does )

bcooksley wrote:I was not referring to the mandriva specific "graphical server setup" which is just drakx11.

That path will not exist in your menu. you should find an application entitled "System settings" or "Personal settings".
You will find two tabs: General & Advanced. ensure "General" is selected. there should be a category called "Computer Administration" under there you will find "Display" that is the KDE Configuration Module for this task.

Alternatively, you can execute: "kcmshell4 display" from konsole.

This tool is like that Gnome tool, it is not a X configuration utility ( doesn't require root anyway which X configuration does )

Thank you for that very helpful reply! Yes, that app is more or less exactly what is needed.

If you sense a "but" coming you are correct What I couldn't change in that dialogue, however, was the refresh rate to what I know works. I want to select 100hz, but the list won't go higher than 75.

Thus, what I guess I want now, given the existing app, is a "force refresh rate" option or something similar, or is there another way of accomplishing this?

It just uses your X configuration. Are you sure you have the 100 hz option added to your xorg.conf? ( i don't know how to go about this, you will probably need to use the mandriva specific tools to set this ). Once the appropriate options are in xorg.conf that tool should provide the possibility to switch to that frequency ( i only have 59.9 hz and thus are only offered 59.9 hz as a option )