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3. Using KVideoGen

3.1 Entering the fixed data describing your graphics hardware

You will have to dig out the manuals for your video card and monitor, and plug the correct values in. Don't guess. You'll only end up with modelines that explode your monitor into your face and melt your graphics card all over your nice shiny processor. Not kidding.

Oh, if you have a card with 128M RAM and a 1GHz RAMDAC, then drop me a line and I'll put the values up. Don't just hack the source and be happy. A diff would be most pleasant. If only I knew what to do with them.

3.2 Making some lovely modes, that make your monitor happy

Now you have found the manuals, and you have ignored my suggestion not to guess the values that got obscured by coffee stains, let's make some modes.

Now, could I have made it easier ? Probably, but harder would have probably been better, to give more control. If you don't like the way this dialog works - say you're into dropping the refresh to let the card concentrate on other stuff, then just let me know. I wrote this to do what I did with a shell script and the original C program. It's not the most comprehensive program, but it might suit the majority.

Ok, just change the resolution and watch the refresh rate change. I suggest you decide what refresh rate you are aiming for, and adjust the resolution until you get around that value. Personally, I can see flicker at refresh rates below 80 Hz, so I stopped at 82Hz, which gave me a resolution of 1424 x 1064.

Panicking yet ? Well who said you had to stick to 640x480, 800x600 etc ?

Next thing to check is the colour depth. All I cared about was being able to do 16bpp. you might see differently. Actually, I fancied 24bpp, but the Mystique driver goes weird :(

Well that's it.. just add modes to your bag at the bottom, then press finish and gape at the unfriendliness of the XFree86 modelines in the little box thing. Save that lot somewhere and get out your favourite editor - which is, of course, vim.

Now find your XF86Config file (usually in /etc). Copy it somewhere, take out a Disaster Recovery contract, and edit it.

Take out all the lines starting with 'Modeline' and then copy the file you saved in there, in the same section.

Now quit X and restart. Bang. Sorry, did I mention there's no warranty ?

Oh, I'd have done the replacement of the XF86Config stuff myself, which would have been nice, but I'm not running this program as root. It's got to be easy to break. Unfortunately we don't have a nice way of doing priviledged stuff in KDE yet. I think the current way is to open a kvt and run 'su -c' in it.

Enough. I hope you enjoy the adrenaline rush when you go to try that new, zippy, high-res mode that might pop your screen.

Rik Hemsley rik@rikkus.demon.co.uk (rikkus ircnet #linux)


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