Drakx11
From Mandriva Community Wiki
This tool allows you to configure your graphical display. With it, you can change your video card, your resolution and your monitor. It can be useful if you change one of your graphical components after the initial installation.
You can find Drakx11 on the Hardware tab of the Mandriva Control Center, or you can launch it from the console with the command Drakx11.
If you are using GDM (the Gnome Display Manager) and the graphical server cannot start because of a configuration error, a dialog offers to reconfigure the graphical server. You get a tool similar to the one described here, but in text mode.
Contents |
Interface
The buttons allow you to change aspects of the graphical configuration:
- Graphic Card The button displays the name of the graphic card currently configured. Click on it if you want to change it. Depending on your card, different servers may be available, with or without 3D acceleration. You may need to try different ones until you get the best result.
Graphic cards are detected using the ldetect-lst engine (also used by lspcidrake) which lists PCI devices and uses the pcitable in order to match the proper driver. The pcitable list is managed by the Install/Tool Team and is manually updated from the kernel & xorg managed pci ids list.
See also Docs/Hardware#Graphic card.
You may be asked if you want to use a proprietary driver for your card, answer Yes to use the driver provided by the card's manufacturer. This driver may give you access to more features and also make your card perform better on 3D applications, such as games.
If you cannot find the graphic card you have, but you know which driver supports it, select it from the Xorg entry at the bottom.
- Monitor Allows you to change the monitor with the tool described in the Changing monitor section.
- Resolution Enables changing the pixel resolution and the color depth with the tool described in Changing resolution section.
- Test Allows you to verify that your modifications actually work. It is highly recommended that you do test it, because if it does not work, it will be harder to recover a working graphical environment later. If the test fails, simply wait until it ends. If you are not satisfied with the suggested settings, choose No during the test, and you will return to the main window.
Depending on your video card, video testing may not be available. You will be warned of such a situation. If it happens that the settings are incorrect and your display does not work, type drakx11 as root in the console to use DrakX11's text version.
- Options
- Graphic card options Depending on your hardware capabilities, you can choose to enable or disable specific features such as hardware acceleration or special visual effects (translucency).
- Graphical interface at startup Use this option to choose whether you want your machine to automatically switch to a graphical interface at boot. Obviously, you may want to disable this option if your machine is to act as a server, or if you were not successful in getting the display configured.
- Quit If you modify your graphical display in some way, the current configuration is displayed and DrakX11 asks you whether you want to keep your changes. This is your last chance to go back to the old configuration. If all seems OK, click on Yes. If you want to restore the previous parameters, click on No.
Confirm the changes and restart your graphical environment to activate the new configuration.
Changing the monitor
Monitor models can be chosen in the following window (see “Choosing a new monitor”). If your monitor was automatically detected, it is listed as Plug'n Play along with its model.
If your monitor wasn't automatically detected, you can choose it from the list, from the Vendor entry. If you don't find your monitor or a compatible one, choose one with parameters corresponding to the monitor from the Generic entry, at the bottom.
Monitor auto-detection
DrakX11 tries hard to have the good default resolution. For this it uses various hardware detection:
- EDID probe
monitor-edid is used.
If it returns a preferred modeline, it is the default resolution chosen by DrakX11.
If it returns a screen size, it will compute a default resolution using this screen size
- DMI probe
Since EDID probe is not always succesful, we added the ability to force the wanted resolution (especially on laptops) using DMI information.
Example of dmitable entry:
System/Manufacturer: Dell Computer .* System/Product Name: Inspiron 8600 => Resolution: 1280x800
With such an entry, using libldetect, Inspiron 8600 gets correct resolution:
% lspcidrake ... Resolution:1280x800: Dell Computer .*|Inspiron 8600
- X probe
If all this fails, we can try running xorg in a test mode and try to extract the resolution from its log
% monitor-probe-using-X 1280x800
- No auto-detection
In that case, it will default to 1024x768
Changing the resolution
Simply choose the resolution (800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, etc.) and the color depth (16 million colors (24 bits), 65 thousand colors (16 bits), etc.) you want from the lists.
The monitor in the window displays what the desktop will look like with the chosen configuration (see “Changing the resolution of your screen”). If it looks good, click OK. Depending on the resolution you've chosen you may need to logout and restart your graphical environment for the settings to take effect.
Monitor and Resolution Ratio. By default, the available resolution list only shows resolutions supported by your video card and monitor combination. There is a special entry named Other that adds more possible resolutions along with their ratios. Bear in mind that most monitors are designed with a 4:3 horizontal vs. vertical ratio.
References
- Monitor auto-detection explained above is coded in libDrakX (drakxtools) :
- First Xconfig::monitor::probe() is called to fill in $monitor
- Later Xconfig::resolution_and_depth::choices() computes the wanted resolution (and also the proposed resolutions)
- Xconfig::resolution_and_depth::size2default_resolution()
