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Monday, October 17, 2016

Get more out of your netbooks screen

My last laptop before my I purchased my Eee PC was a Lenovo Thinkpad T60P which I bought for three reasons; 1) it was linux certified, 2) the price was right (under $250) and 3) it came with a legit copy of XP Pro. My one and ONLY complaint I ever had about that laptop was the fact that the screen resolution was a maximum 1024x768. However, when running OpenSUSE I found that the resolution defaulted to a much higher resolution, scaled by xrandr. I never did figure out how this was achieved until this morning, whcn I discovered that xrandr is capable of both scaling and panning higher resolutions. It dawned on me that if you can run a virtual Xserver in a higher resolution than what is natively supported by your screen, something I came across when running Ubuntu on my Android phone.

It took a little experimentation and tweaking to get it just right, but the final result I came up with was the following command

xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1024x600 --scale 1.333x1.333 --panning 1365x800

The big issue in the end turned out to be the scaling factor. Originally I assumed that xrandr only supported two decimal points in scale factor, which turned out not to be the case. What originally prompted me to want a higher resolution was the fact that running certain applications when the window is maximized causes the window to "snap" up and down if the window is larger than the screen size. At first I was aiming for a resolution 1280 width resolution, but the issue with the snapping windows was not alleviated. Apparently the gnome desktop is designed for a minimum screen height of 800 pixels and many applications wont play nice in anything smaller than that. Of course even higher resolutions can be achieved, but the small size of the screen makes the text hard enough to read as it is. Bumping font sizes up to 12pt makes the screen a little easier to read without distorting things.

After finding a resolution that works for you, there are two methods I know of that will make the resolution change permanent. The first is to add the above command to your ~/.xprofile file. The other is to add it to /etc/gdm/Init/Default. The second option requires root access and will affect every user who logs in to the computer. I just chose to edit my .xprofile.

Now to see if I can do the same on Windows 7....

EDIT

So after achieving my desired resolution of 1365x800 in Linux and addressing my issues with fullscreen applications on the tiny screen, I decided to take a crack at doing the same on Windows 7. I did an exhaustive Google search on how to force a higher resolution, but for the most part I came up empty handed. What I did find however was the fact that I have an Intel graphics chip meant that I was in luck. For those of you who have ATI or Nvidia graphics on you netbook, youre pretty much stuck with the 1024x600 resolution.

Flat out, I was unable to achieve a resolution anywhere near what I got in Linux. I even tried an app called "Netbook Resolution Customizer" which is supposedly capable of forcing custom resolution modes using Linux modelines (use the command cvt to generate one). NRC does absolutely nothing. However, I was at the very least able to force 1024x768. Not exactly what I was after, and the screen does get skewed but Ill take what I can get. This is achieved through simple registry hacks. Basically, you just open up regedit.exe and search for Display1_DownScalingSupported. Change every instance that the search finds from 0 to 1 and then reboot. The information I found on this hack states that its supposed to enable resolution up to 1152x864, which albeit skewed is much better than 1024x600. I did not get anything higher than 1024x768 but like I said, Ill take what I can get.

Available link for download