Hi there,

I've been trying to get X to look and feel 'nice' and the first thing I want is 1280x1024@85Hz, in 24 bit colour if possible. Oddly I can't seem to get it. I know the monitor/gfx card combo are capable as it's what my windoze desktop runs at.

Playing with XF86Config, I can get 1280x1024 if I set the vertical refresh to be within the max range of the monitor (50-130Hz) and the monitor (and my throbbing eyes!) tell me it's doing 60Hz. Yet when I increase the lower limit to 85Hz X won't give me more than 1024x768, and then it does it at 85Hz.

Any pointers most welcome...

What distro ? If you're using KDE for a desktop, go to control center and pick peripherals and then display. Enter root password and pick screen. It should let you pick the resolution and refresh rate you want there.

Ah thanks, I hadn't appreciated it could be adjusted from within the desktop! I'll go try it now

Problem. Display isn't listed as a peripheral

I've looked all through the whole CC list and there doesn't appear to be anything I can change to affect the display settings. Any clue as to what I'm missing here?

In some Distros, Display does not appear in KDE Control Centre, Mandrake among them. I am trying to set up Gentoo in another partition (that's another issue and I am struggling) and found that the KDE Display Manager completely messed up my display and the only solution was to edit XF86Config by hand.

My video system does 24 colours at 1280x1024 in Windoze, and with the "nv" (ie not 3D accelerated) driver in Linux, but with the "nvidia" (3D accelerated) driver it will only do 16 colours at that res, but to be honest I cannot tell the difference in the colour depths.

You said you adjusted the VertRefresh range but did you adjust the HorizSync? I once had a problem with that, in that my HorizSync line in XF86Config-4 went up to 79, but 80.3 was needed. Because 75Hz VR would not work without 80.3kHz HS, it clocked down to 60Hz VR which gives an unstable display on my monitor.

If you have Windoze loaded as well, boot it up and press your button and see what your HS reading is at your desired VR. Then make sure that is in range in your XFConfig86 file's HorizSync line. Reboot linux after correcting it and all may start working for you.

DAVE

Aha! My winders desktop runs the monitor up to a much higher horizontal frequency than the max I've set in the config file, I bet that's it. Thanks muchly!