[ILUG] How to change screen Res on the Fly???

[Niall O Broin]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2000 at 10:38:48AM +0000, Ruairi Newman wrote:

> You were right, it IS [CTRL]-[+].   _However_ this requires that you
> have multiple modes set up in your /etc/XF86Config.   When you do a
> [CTRL]-[+] X looks at this file for the next valid mode settings, and IF
> it finds something will attempt to switch to it.
> 
> Theres a lot of good info on http://www.xfree86.org/ about setting up
> your XF86Config, check it out.

> > How, in X Windows (KDE) do you change the %&$&^% screen resolution, say
> > from 640X480 to 800X600?  I thought it was [CTRL and +], but it's not
> > working for me.  What am I doing wrong???

This never seemed to work for me in the past, and I didn't investigate it at
any length because I didn't really care - don't have a lot of reason to use
< 1600x1200, although it'd occasionally be useful for testing. However, I
recently was playing with another box and I think I cracked it - it seems
that modeswitching will only work if you have a virtual desktop size defined
which is at least as big as your highest resolution (I was using a virtual
desktop size the same as my highest resolution, but I presume bigger would
work too). Am I correct in my deduction ?

I think I can see the logic, in that this means that physical screen
resolution can be changed without affecting the positions or sizes of
existing windows, so only the X server is involved. Otherwise, the WM would
have to be involved too, so that it could resize all windows to fit inside a
smaller resolution (of course there's no issue if a higher reolution is
selected). 'doze does this (just checked in VMware) by simply arbitrarily
resizing windows so that they fit in the new screen size.


Regards,


Niall