KDE & me

3 comments

• Comment Link Saturday, 11 June 2005 posted by Eric Maziade

  I eventually figured the xorg.conf thing. It's not there by default. I had to run "xorgconfig" (or something to that effect) to generate it (or i could've just edited the sample config file).

  
  
  

  
  I didn't have much time to play with it yesterday and it seems that the config I had it do didn't detect the mouse... oh well, I'll get it working on monday :)
  
• Comment Link Friday, 10 June 2005 posted by Patrice Levesque

  Oh, and by the way, just to brag about X, you can get any reasonable resolution if you get the timings (monitor and card) right [The list of timings needed for a particular resolution at a particular refresh rate is called a modeline in X's world]. This means you could get a 1280x800 or 968x684 or whatever resolution. Not useful every day of the week, but for emulating arcade games sometimes it's better to get a pure 720x400 than to scale.
  
  You can get one (of the many) modeline generator here: http://koala.ilog.fr/cgi-bin/nph-colas-modelines" title="http://koala.ilog.fr/cgi-bin/nph-colas-modelines">koala.ilog.fr/cgi-bin/nph...
  
  
  
  And if your monitor is too old to grasp the concept of "keeping independant position and size settings for each resolution", `xvidtune` can be used to tweak the videocard directly (in fact, to get more adequate modelines for already existing resolutions).
  
  
• Comment Link Friday, 10 June 2005 posted by Patrice Levesque

  As you might already know, KDE is « just » a window manager above X; you could run Gnome/IceWM/FvWM/XFCE/Enlightenment/... instead of KDE because of this separation.
  
  
  
  So KDE is just a X application with almost no power on your hardware; the trouble with your configuration is probably to be found in a misconfigured X.
  
  
  
  _First_things_first_: nVidia cards are semi-supported on a GNU/Linux system; by that I mean there are 2 possible drivers; 1 is free software and doesn't do 3D acceleration yet; the other one is proprietary software, does 3D and is shipped by nVidia (ask google for 'nvidia linux').
  
  
  
  You probably want the proprietary driver; instructions are provided in the tarball shipped by nVidia.
  
  
  
  Still, the free-software-driver should be able to deliver more than 640x480; I'd take a peek at /etc/X11/xorg.conf (usually it's there, dunno about Gentoo specifics). Watch closely for monitor timings, they just might be wrong. There is also probably a X configuration tool shipped by Gentoo should you want to pick your monitor off a list instead of transcribing monitor frequencies off a webpage.
  
  
  
  You'll have to restart X for any change to xorg.conf to take effect; Ctrl-Alt-Backspace (cute isn't it?) is your key combo to restart X.
  
  
  
  You might also want to take a peek at what hardware is detected by X; usually you'll find a logfile in /var/log/Xorg.0.log