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

[Fergal Daly]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2000 at 11:49:13AM +0000, Niall O Broin wrote:
> 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.

I'm pretty sure you need CTRL, ALT and +, that's what works on my machine in
front of me, CTRL and + on their own just gets sent to the window that has
the focus.

> 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 ?

You should be able to switch into any res which is smaller or equal to your
desktop size.

> 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.

I'd consider this a feature of Windows, need more screen for something, just
bump up the res, the desktop expands with it. With X you have to quit, edit
the config and then restart with the new res and desktop size, then when you
want to go back you have to do it all again, otherwise you end up having to
scroll all over the place.

There is a project to entedn thee X protocol to handle resizing and rotating
and other stuff, mainly intended for use on PDAs but it should fix things
for everyone,

Fergal