A complaint in the hope of a solution, or at least some attention.

sublimepua · 2011-08-13 02:34:21

On May of 2011, an update to X.Org was pushed into core that made working with a netbook very difficult. I have an acer with 250gb HDD, 2GB RAM and a 1.6Ghz processor. For all but the most taxing tasks, it it quite snappy. The obvious limitation is the screen. Cue linux. There is a feature of X.Org that allows one to scale the screen upwards, to have a higher virtual resolution. I've used it to artificially upgrade video performance on laptops, desktops, and netbooks for a while. The syntax is as follows: xrandr --output [screen name] --mode [current resolution] --scale [decimal of scaling percentage] --panning [new resolution] For my 1024x600 screen, it is xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1024x600 --scale 1.25x1.25 --panning 1280x750

Arch was for a long time my favorite linux distribution. The update in march made panning not work any more; the mouse becomes trapped within a border the size of the origional screen, situated in the upper left. When this update was pushed through, the arch forums were ablaze with help threads looking for an answer. I was the only one motivated enough to post a bug report. Despite the attention surrounding it, and the fact that it makes netbooks very hard to use, it was flagged as a low priority and ignored by the X.Org package maintainer.

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/24274

I did some testing to confirm it was not an intel driver update, but indeed the xorg package, and it is. I emailed the package maintainer, submitted a bug report, annoyed some devs on the freenode channel, and basically got referred from one dev to another as they all told me it wasn't their area of expertise and that I should fix it myself. Despite an attempt at teaching myself the entire X.org subsystem, I came up empty handed.The attention died down. I accepted that to use my netbook, I would have to switch distributions. I have been running gentoo with their X.Org updated to the same version and its working fine. It must be some patching done by the arch devs itself that broke it. Yes, this issue is that important to some of us that we will leave arch rather than have our computers crippled. Nowadays, all I hear about it is a tri-weekly comment on the bug report confirming it and asking why it has not been fixed.

Why hasn't it been fixed? I will try to fix it again, if any devs familar with X.Org would be willing to help me. I miss arch. I miss the speed. I miss the simplicity. I miss the adherance to the pilosophy of simplicity. May I ask that the people who maintain the package at least try to fix it?

Allan · 2011-08-13 04:15:08

This looks like one of those issue where someone using that feature needs to find the fix. I guess the main maintainers of the xorg packages in Arch do not have netbooks and thus do not use this feature and so would find it difficult to fix themselves. I do note the bug report suggests the same issue is present in Fedora and Mint so it does not appear to be Arch specific...

sublimepua · 2011-08-13 04:16:15

I run both Fedora and Linux Mint on friend's machines and scaling works perfectly for both of them. Does anyone know how to contact Jan de Groot?

Last edited by sublimepua (2011-08-13 04:17:14)

Cdh · 2011-08-13 07:46:55

sublimepua wrote:

May I ask that the people who maintain the package at least try to fix it?

Sounds as if you try to fix this within the arch community when it is a x.org problem...
Have you tried reporting the bug upstream?
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/

Arch Linux

#1 2011-08-13 02:34:21

A complaint in the hope of a solution, or at least some attention.

#2 2011-08-13 04:15:08

Re: A complaint in the hope of a solution, or at least some attention.

#3 2011-08-13 04:16:15

Re: A complaint in the hope of a solution, or at least some attention.

#4 2011-08-13 07:46:55

Re: A complaint in the hope of a solution, or at least some attention.

Board footer