Woah, 17 days since my last posting! What’s the matter with me? I don’t know, but I think I’ll once again aim for a string of shorter and more regular entries.

I got a bee in my bonnet about the screen resolution on my laptop. I like high resolutions, and I realized that one of my biggest frustrations with the thing was that the resolution was a mere 800×600, but that I’d never really devoted any time to trying to fix it. So, with nothing much going on for my tonight, I decided to devote some time.

Standard procedure: google for someone else who worked on this (“modeline config file xorg.conf” turned out to be the winning search) and see what they did. The answer: run a tool called gtf that writes config file lines for you (“gtf 1024 768 60 -v” was the actual line that gave me what I wanted) and then paste it into the config file. Restart XWindows, and… voila! It was really just about that simple.

So, if it’s so simple, why did I need to google for the answer and manually edit the file? Why isn’t there a utility that does this in a nice, warm, gui environment? There is supposedly such a utility on my Fedora 4 installation, but it didn’t help at all. It only offered 800×600 and 640×480. This is what’s bad about linux as a desktop platform right now. And, of course, now that I’ve got it how I want it, I have no personal motivation to make something that does a better job. So these things remain difficult.

Idk. I’m hoping that the Linux variants that are being sold on cheap computers these days know their own hardware and thus spare their users of these kinds of frustrations. But, I’ve never used one, so I don’t know.

David