Fonts in application growing with screen resolution - peppermint OS
 

I am posting here a question that got no reply on the official peppermint linux forums.

I installed peppermint in a virtual machine. Everything seems impressively nice and simple, but there is one annoying problem I do not know how to solve.

After the installation, the screen resolution was set, for some reason, to 800x600. My screen is a 1280x1024 LCD, so I changed (via preferences -> monitor settings) the resolution to 1280x1024. After the change the fonts in applications (but not in the OS menu itself, see http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/8249 ... ntsize.png ) became huge. I checked the settings and the sizes there seem correct. It seems as though the OS thinks the screen's DPI is different than it is, because other elements (eg. images and the OS's own bar at the bottom of the screen, whose sizes are pixel-based) remain in a correct size.

I tried other screen resolutions, and it is apparent that the size of the fonts increase in proportion to the chosen resolution: the higher the resolution, the larger the fonts in application become. In 1280x1024 the fonts are so large that they render some UIs impossible to use.

Any idea why this happens and how it can be solved?

That's the direct reverse of the usual situation. Higher resolution usually means smaller fonts, so something funny is happening. Pin more details down. I also suggest you look at man xorg.conf, for fancy settings.

So what is your recipe to counter that (very much annoying) effect?

I have not yet tried to add anything to the xorg.conf file because there is no such file in this distribution. It was suggested to me that a xorg.conf file can be added to override the automatic settings, but and I am not knowledgeable enough to know exactly what to do before reading a little but about it.

In the meantime, however, I tried to install, also in a vmware virtual machine, another lxde distribution, lubuntu, and it seems that it has the same problem. This time the host machine was a netbook with a 1024x600 display. The virtual machine started at 800x600, and the correct resolution for the screen was not available at all. When I edited the vmx file to contain a maximum resolution of 1024x600 this resolution became available in the VM, and the fonts, again, grew as I increased the resolution.

This seems to be a problem with LXDE. I am wondering whether it is unique to running in vmware, or if this happens also on regular hardware.

I am interested both in understanding why this problem happens, and in some more guidance on how to solve the problem. I have only basic understanding of how these things work.

Do you want to start with an xorg.conf and we can tune things a bit with it.

X -Configure