[SOLVED] Setting screen resolution in Wary

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barbecue
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Joined: Thu 02 Aug 2012, 23:28

[SOLVED] Setting screen resolution in Wary

#1 Post by barbecue »

** First timer **

Please suggest how to set the screen resolution to 800x480 (in Wary).

Unfortunately, 800x480 ("WVGA") is not one of the options listed when xorgwizard probes my video hardware. I attempted to set the resolution by editing Xorg.conf but achieved only partial success.

The other posts on this topic (setting the resolution to 800x480) seem to resolve or work-around this screen resolution issue for the EEE-pc, but my netbook is rather different - RoverBook U900. It requires Wary Puppy due to the peculiarities and modest capabilities of its "RDC R3306" processor. (Aside: I guess this machine is not radically different from a Gecko edubook with native 800x480 resolution.)
Last edited by barbecue on Tue 22 Jan 2013, 11:38, edited 3 times in total.

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Monsie
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Location: Kamloops BC Canada

Setting screen resolution to 800x480 ("WVGA") in Wary 5.3

#2 Post by Monsie »

barbecue,

To set a custom resolution, you can try defining a new Modeline and entering those values in the Section "Monitor" of Xorg.conf and if there is an option that defines "PreferredMode" then you will need to comment that line out. Here is my output at the terminal:

Code: Select all

# gtf 800 480 60

  # 800x480 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 29.82 kHz; pclk: 29.58 MHz
  Modeline "800x480_60.00"  29.58  800 816 896 992  480 481 484 497  -HSync +Vsync
From this information: Modeline "800x480_60.00" 29.58 800 816 896 992 480 481 484 497 -HSync +Vsync is what is added to: /etc/X11/xorg.conf Save your changes, then -->Menu-->Shutdown-->Restart X server You may get a black screen and command prompt in which case type: xorgwizard at the command prompt to let you re-select your video driver and choose your new resolution.

Note: this might not work... in my case it doesn't because the new Modeline sets a hsync value that is below the operating range of my monitor, so xorg.conf retains the default or preferred values.

Good Luck,
Monsie
My [u]username[/u] is pronounced: "mun-see". Derived from my surname, it was my nickname throughout high school.

barbecue
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu 02 Aug 2012, 23:28

#3 Post by barbecue »

Monsie,


I'm embarrassed.

While editing Xorg.conf and then, probing, testing and choosing various options, and having no success at first, I began to suspect the native resolution of my netbook might not be WVGA (800x480) as I reported. To my surprise, the netbook seems to behave quite well at 1024x600 pixels (ie, WSVGA) - which is available as a standard option in xorgwizard.

The "Lighthouse report-video" available in Wary's system sub-menu also seems to suggest that this higher resolution may be native ("d.0 VGA compatible controller... dimensions 1024x600 pixels 347x203 mm... depth of root window 16 planes").

In any case, sincere thanks for your suggested answer. It gave me the clues and the impetus I needed.


barbecue.

starhawk
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#4 Post by starhawk »

Just a thought, even though it looks like this is solved... you might try a slightly older version of Puppy, called Fluppy 013. You can get it here --> http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=56156

That particular Puplet (as we call them) is intended for laptops and netbooks.

One other thing -- if this is indeed a solved topic, please edit your first post so that the title includes " [SOLVED] " (without quote marks). (No need for a mod to do this -- all members can edit their thread titles here.) This just lets us know that you got what you needed.

EDIT: also -- welcome, as we say, to the Kennels :D

barbecue
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu 02 Aug 2012, 23:28

#5 Post by barbecue »

Thanks for the woofs (the hearty welcome to the kennel) and thanks for the suggestion to try Fluppy. Unfortunately the primitive processor in my netbook does not have "cmov", a feature required by the kernels included in the current Fluppy, the current Saluki, and many other modern distros. The best OS for the RoverBook U900 does seems to be WaryPuppy - especially after discovering the native screen resolution is a fairly standard 1024x600 pixels.

Aside: Puppy 4.3.1 and SuliPuppy1.0-English (based on 4.3.1) also work pretty well, with resolution 1024x600, and even with 24-bit colour. However, both of these excellent old OSs seem to have these screen features readily available (for my hardware) only through Xvesa, not Xorg.

bbq

starhawk
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#6 Post by starhawk »

Did some looking-up on that CPU... boy is that thing weird. If I'm understanding things correctly, it's got more similarities to an ARM chip than anything Intel or AMD...

I don't know how much you know about computing, so I'll put in here a little bit of a crash course in how a CPU does its thing, just enough so that you can get what I'm talking about.

A CPU, like any other part of a computer, has a certain "language" that it speaks, called an instruction set. At this time, there are two major kinds of instruction sets -- that is, two 'umbrella' categories under which most CPUs fall. They are called RISC and CISC.

CISC, or Complex Instruction Set Computing, is what Intel used in the 8086 and 8088 CPUs that, as part of the IBM Personal Computer (aka IBM 5150) in 1981, made modern computing more-or-less what it is now. (I have to be careful with my wording here, because the IBM PC was not the first "personal computer" -- just the first one really to be called that, and the one that caught on the most.)

The idea of CISC is that you have a lot of little instructions, or operations ("ops"), that a CPU can use, each doing one or two things, depending on context. So, for example, you'd have a "load" op to fetch either another instruction or some important data from memory, and then several other ops involved in doing stuff with it.

RISC, on the other hand, commonly found in ARM CPUs (among other places) and predictably short for Reduced Instruction Set Computing, refers to instructions that 'do more with less' -- so while you'd still have the load op, it would have a bunch of options that allowed it to do more than just pull stuff from a particular memory address.

RISC / CISC do not have anything to do with how many instructions are supported by the CPU, just how those instructions are used, and the design philosophy behind them.

What this RDC company seems to have figured out, is how to emulate an x86 (CISC) architecture (overall design and operation paradigm) with a RISC CPU. Considering that it has to emulate a CISC processor, it's doing a lot of work -- it's translating the low-level instructions for another CPU, then executing them, and translating the resulting output back into what that other processor should say. It has to be a near-perfect translation on both ends, too -- if it's not, very bad things happen!

If you want to learn a little more...
RISC @ Wikipedia
CISC @ Wikipedia

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