[techtalk] Changing the Console Video Mode

[Rik Hemsley]

#if GJS
> As an aside, I've had the monitor for a couple of days now and
> my eyes are having a hard time adusting to it. I didn't think a
> couple of extra inches would make this much difference. (I have
> a feeling my bifocals may be part of the problem. They were fine
> with the old monitor, but my viewing angle has changed.) Did
> anyone else have an adjustment problem when they went to a
> bigger monitor?

Avoiding quips about the extra couple of inches...

Glasses aren't really fun to wear when you use a monitor. If you're
short sighted, you should take off your glasses. If you're long
sighted, you could be sitting a little too close to the screen.
The problem is that all glasses distort your image slightly and
this distortion increases towards the periphery of your vision.
If you sit further back, more of the monitor is in the centre of
your vision and you get less distortion.

Note: You won't notice this distortion very much, but your brain
will, so don't assume that because everything _looks_ ok, it is :)

The other thing you might need to check is the refresh rate. Perhaps
you are running at a lower refresh rate, or simply the fact that
there's more screen space means that your brain gets tired of
looking at such a large, flickery picture for a long time.

Again, flicker isn't something that's immediately obvious to most
people. Personally, I can tell you what rate a monitor's scanning
at just by looking at it, but perhaps my brain's refresh is too
high ;)

What you need to do is to look away from your monitor, so that you
can only see it from one eye. You'll probably want to get approx.
a 60-90 degree angle. Now don't turn your eye to look at the screen,
look straight ahead. You'll still be able to see the screen from
the corner of your eye. When you do this, you should be able to
see flicker better. If you don't see any, you're probably ok.

As a rough guide, try to get the refresh up to about 80Hz. Anything
above 72Hz is 'legal' (recommended by most guidelines) but I disagree.

I don't know about mode generators for console, but I've written
one for X that you may find useful, if you can work out how to
convert the values it spits out into mode definitions for fbdev (console).

The url is http://without.netpedia.net and you're looking for kvideogen.

If you have any more questions or need more help, don't hesitate
to ask.

Cheers,
Rik

-- 
2. Implicate yourself in every interpretation.

************
techtalk at linuxchix.org   http://www.linuxchix.org