Barry Samuels wrote:
I have just replaced my monitor with a TFT panel.
...then Adam Bower wrote:
Thats along my lines of thought, most of the panels I have played with have an auto-adjust button that resizes the screen. Does yours have one, and does it work? Also if you turn the screen off and on again does that make it work
also?
For what it's worth, my experience with Linux and TFTs got off to a very frustrating start. My Linux box runs SLackware 8.1 and has an ATI AGP video card identified as 'ATI 3D Pro Turbo' which I'd managed to set up quite nicely with my Dell 15" CRT monitor and everything seemed to work well - even the screen blanking after about 15 minutes.
When I received an LG Flatron 1510S LCD to try on extended loan, I read its book, set the vertical rate to 60Hz for all modes as suggested and was met with a blank screen on starting X. I tried every combination of settings I could think of, but it wouldn't have it. Eventually, I swapped my XF86 config file for one provided by Slackware called XF86config-fbdev, which I think uses a plain VESA driver. At last pictures, but that's about all. Now the screen blanking doesn't work in X at all and there's a curious effect when the screen tries to blank in non-X working: the normal white text blanks, but any highlighted text (e.g., in 'man' pages) remains displayed - very odd.
I also had problems when I tried to use the Flatron LCD to install Suse 8.1 on a friend's PC. No matter what settings I tried, the image on the screen would flash on and off every 1 or 2 seconds while X was running. Eventually I gave up and used a CRT monitor for the rest of that installation job. I know that that particular PC installation has been used since with a Philips LCD without any apparent problems, so maybe Flat Ron hasn't quite got the hang of something! Maybe not all LCDs are equal?
The LG Flatron 1510S has one of those autoselect buttons mentioned by Adam, but I find that it generally manages to hit a setting that's far from optimal, especially when working at less than its maximum 1024x768 resolution. That applies equally in Linux and also in DOS, which is where I spend most of my working hours. I've found that the best way to set the clock and phase settings on the LCD is to display a screen full of very small dots (the 'grid' on a CAD programme works very wellfor this) and then adjust 'clock' and 'phase' to remove any visible interference patterns visible between the grid structure and the LCD's dot structure. If you get these settings wrong, some vertical lines (depending on where on the screen they fall) get smeared horribly across several of the LCD's pixels - useless for CAD!
Interestingly, when I tried the Knoppix CD (kindly provided by Adam) on my box, it ran up, detected my video card and LCD and managed to set the correct parameters first time using an ATI driver. And it managed to pick a good-looking smaller than normal font for the text display whilst booting up - something I've never succeeded in doing with Slackware. All I told Knoppix was that the vertical rate should be 60Hz at the boot prompt.
Cheers,
Gerald.