Arch Linux

bstaletic

Member

Registered: 2014-02-02

Posts: 658

Resolution problems with Acer aspire 5520

Hello,

I'm having trouble making both tty and Xorg resolution be native. I have an nVidia 7000M gpu.With nouveau drivers I managed to get KMS working, but realized Xorg resolution is wrong. If I set the right resolution with xrandr the problem with tiling WMs similar to what I explained in this thread. What is different is mouse can go to the blank part and still be visible, floating windows could be placed in the blank area or resized to full screen, but WM won't ever place windows there. Some tiling WMs are able to utilize the full width of the screen. WMs that do not work like this are dwm, wmii and musca.

Dwm has problems displaying conky in its bar (cuts of a lot of output). This made me think the problem is not the resolution/driver and, dwm being my favourite WM, helped hiding the problem.
Wmii utilises the whole screen after change of resolution, but leaves an unmovable vertical line where right edge of a window used to be prior to resolution change.
Musca just works, but could take some getting used to.

All floating WMs work perfectly.

Then I tried nVidia closed source drivers, which worked perfectly in Xorg. The problem was no KMS. I installed and enabled uvesafb, but it did not change the maximum tty resolution from 1024x768.

The WMs I tried:

• dwm

• fluxbox

• i3

• musca

• snapwm

• spectrwmsubtle

• A lot of others I either did not like, or they required some configuration to even start

What I tried to fix the problem: various xrandr options (with nouveau), various kernel command line options (with nvidia) and what was mentioned in arch wiki about screen xorg configuration. Nothing I did to "/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-screen.conf" had any effect so I just deleted the file to ease switching between nouveau and nvidia.

As to which driver I intend to use... I don't care as long as it can display everything correctly.

P.S.
/etc/modprobe.d/uvesafb.conf has only one lien

options uvesafb mode_option=1280x800-32 scroll=ywrap

cat /sys/bus/platform/drivers/uvesafb/uvesafb.0/vbe_modes

says top resolution is 1024x768.

EDIT:
Just now I've tried every tiling WM I could find, and the ones working are echinus, musca and qtile.

Last edited by bstaletic (2015-05-30 18:11:25)

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