Linux HAL Screen Resolution

Question

I just got myself an EEE PC and whacked Arch Linux on there. It's humming away nicely. Kudos to Asus on this fine machine.

One thing that slightly annoys me is the screen resolution. With the font size decreased, it's not too bad. But I want it bigger than 1024x600.

In my limited days of Linux, I used to do these changes in Xorg.conf. But with the introduction of HAL, this stuff is all dynamically set, right? So how can I tell HAL to add a few of my own resolutions to choose from rather than assuming the one that'd work best?

Can this be done?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, it's an LCD. You can't set the resolution above 1024x600 (if your Eee PC is anything like mine). It uses LVDS, not VGA, and so your desktop resolution is defined by the native resolution of the LCD.

That said, you can put in modelines in xorg.conf the exact same way you have for the last 10 years. man xorg.conf will help you there. But putting in a 2048x2048 modeline won't magically transform your 10-inch laptop into a 30-inch screen -- X.org will just ignore the non-working modelines.

xrandr is a command useful for tweaking resolutions and things. You can load up modelines on-the-fly by using xrandr --newmode mode_name_here modeline_here, and then adding it to your display with xrandr --output LVDS --addmode mode_name_here ('LVDS' would be the name of your Eee PC's built-in monitor). See xrandr --help or man xrandr for more help.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what the largest resolution is which those screens physically support. I believe that may be the best - depending of course on your particular model.

However, I'd suggest asking this on superuser.com as that is the appropriate forum for config problems etc. This is for coding questions. Better yet, archlinux has their own forum - http://bbs.archlinux.org/ . They are really helpful there, use arch myself.