- This topic has 65 replies, 9 voices, and was last updated Sep 20-6:54 am by Xecure.
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BobC
I got the 5.8.7 downloaded and the USB remastered, testing that first. After that I will go look for 5.8.16 and try it. I’m not sure what you mean by MX ahs, but I’ll look for it on the screen.
The solution I gave above would solve the problem at least when booted from flashdrive, btw. Maybe we could just do a calculation to see if the screen would be hard to read, and if it was, bring up arandr to help?
I tried 5.8.7. When booted from flashdrive it is also ok until you get to X-windows.
I was not able to find 5.8.16. The newest I found was 5.8.10. Where can I find 5.8.16 if you think that will help?
Xecure
Maybe I am understanding the problem wrong, but I don’t think trying kernels will help.
What I understand so far:
1. antiX boots properly to a Graphical Environment when using an ultra-wide screen. [All well there]
2. Screen resolution is SO BIG that everything on screen is SO SMALL you can barely see anything. The higher the resolution, the less visible everything is (menus are tiny, text is flea size, icons are akin to smudges on the screen, etc.).
3. Increasing the text dpi helps with the text, but to do so, finding the menu entry is difficult. The best solution is increasing font size with the boot parameter, but not everyone knows how to do this.Changing kernel may help with better driver and maybe even higher resolutions, but will not solve the main problem (I think).
MX Linux has no trouble because it uses a DE, and XFCE (I think) has a DPI method to re-scale al elements (text, menus and icons) when it detects a HiDPi display (I will test this tomorrow on a “Retina Display like” tablet and try to illustrate with how MX and antiX look when first booted from live USB.If I am wrong, please forgive my post. Let me know and I will remove all I have written to not confuse anyone else.
antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.Yes, Xecure is correct. I got the pic from my phone over to this machine (not the one being tested) to edit and post the pic.
PS: actually, the conky and control centre are improved from the 2.0 font size, I think. Them menu is still super small, but if you got to the control centre and knew what to do, you would be ok.
Again, I think the best solution is to notice that the screen is very hard to read, and at least make it easy to figure out how to fix it for a normal person unfamiliar with antiX.
- This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by BobC.
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I tinkered with it some more. If I change the font to 2.2 and change the theme to Blue Day Large, the only thing bad is the miniature taskbar with large characters and the desktop icons a little out of place. 2.0 is a bit small on the conky.
If we were to make a Blue Day 4K theme, it could solve it, but would normal people be able to figure out how to make those changes?
Maybe it’s time for a Welcome to antiX screen with selections to change selections of things and get WiFi connected. I think people are used to that these days.
seaken64
Another thing to consider is the native resolution of the panel. We can change the resolution in a startup file but the panel may not look so good unless using the native resolution. Will setting the font size be enough to improve the interface on these very large screen resolutions? I don’t know. I’m just spitballing here. I know I get bad results when I set a flat digital panel to anything other than native. I don’t have the same problem on a multi-sync CRT.
Seaken64
Since I was working on a new theme anyway, I created a Huge4K variant for it and tested it with anti’s 2.0 fontsize. It looks quite nice on 15 inch and also 42 inch in 4K video mode. I posted a pic in my new theme thread, unfortunately the link didn’t take me to the right post, so I’ll post it again here. Its not a large jpg file..
I still believe it would be nicer if we could make it easy for normal people to get something like this working without needing to ask for help. Because some places aren’t as friendly as here, many people might be afraid to ask.
https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/new-theme-for-antix-icewm/page/3/#post-45119
- This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by BobC.
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Xecure
Give me some time and I will try writing an auto-scale script that would run from startup that will check the current resolution, see if the display uses a HiDPi resolution, and automatically apply a scaling factor (if non was applied before), and launch a pop up window message informing the user. It shouldn’t be too difficult. And it would be easy to disable by commenting the line in startup.
antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.Xecure
Sorry for the delay.
I have been trying to figure out how to create a way to identify a display (there is a number of strings that identifies each connected device (EDID). If there is a program to parse the strings, we can identify the monitor, but as it doesn’t come by default in antiX, I was trying to figure out a different path to save and load configurations based on the EDID.I have a “half-baked” script that, if added to startup, it will check during startup if any connected monitor has a HiDPI display and will autoscale it. After autoscaling, it will pop up a (yad) window explaining what has happened and give you the option to revert the changes, Apply them, or Revert and change the resolution with arandr.
Here is the script: https://filebin.net/ra8k10o97hrdz9q4
The script needs improvements:
– Check if a configuration has already been saved in ~/.screenlayout/, apply it for that identified display and skip the HiDPI check (as a configuration already exists) for that display.
– An option to disable this script from startup
– I will have to create a different way if arandr wants to be used.The script works with the scale option in xrandr (see Francisco’s tutorial). I will probably replace it with selecting a lower resolution instead of applying a scaling factor, so that when arandr is selected the script doesn’t need to revert the autoscaling changes.
(arandr doesn’t understand what is going on if there is a scaling factor involved).The other option is for me to create a separate mini-program to manage resolution and scaling (to replace launching arandr for changing the resolution).
I have been helping to port a qt 4.8 based program to create dialogs (ala gtkdialog) to qt5, so I may be using this tool to create the program. More info when I have something ready.Once this is working properly, we can include it in antix-goodies and add it as an entry in the startup file in ~/.desktop-session/ for the next antiX release.
antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.Xecure, I’ll give it a try tonight. Thanks for your efforts 🙂
Xecure, it looks like its having troubles. I got a little box, but it’s very hard to read becauseits in 3840×2160. I couldn’t really read the rest. Then I click apply green button. I can see it got an error but can’t see what it tried to do. Screen format didn’t change.
I’ll try to figure it out.
Thanks for helping, Xecure
Ok, the problem is that DISPLAY_RES contains 2 values: “primary 3840×2160”. I added some echos to the terminal to show the values as they were calculated. Maybe that’s why the box pops up very tiny. I’m attaching a pic showing the code, input and output…
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Ok, I figured it out and fixed it. It’s just 3-5 needs to be 4-5 instead. Code attached. It fixed the size of the box, too.
for word in "$(echo $line | cut -d" " -f4-5)"; doI also changed the command itself, but unsure if that was really causing any problem.
xrandr --output "${DISPLAY_ID}" --mode "${DISPLAY_RES}" --scale "${DISPLAY_SCALE}x${DISPLAY_SCALE}"- This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by BobC.
PS: anti, the version 5.x kernels all failed including 5.8.16. The 4.19.152-antix.1-amd64-smp kernel is working fine. I get a completely black screen with the 5.8 kernels. At some point I will get daring again and load ArcoLinux or something else (maybe Debian or MX) with a version 5 kernel to see if it’s version or antiX specific. Thanks for your help.
Anonymous
just use a proper distro with scaling if you have a capable machine.
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