Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Yeah, video tends to be quirky.
The old notebook running Ubuntu has an ATI Mobility chipset, and does 1280x768 resolution in Windows. (In Windows, it will go even higher, but it does so by creating a 1280x768 window onto a larger workspace, and you pan to see it all. No thanks.)
Getting that in Ubuntu required using ndiswrapper to use the Windows driver. The free driver did 1024x768 at best, And even then, Ubuntu reverted to 1024x768 after one OS upgrade. Poking around indicated Ubuntu knew what the card could theoretically do, but I couldn't track down the config file I needed to change to get the expected performance. Things were back to normal after the next Ubuntu upgrade.
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Yeah, new kernels and various platform updates tend to have dramatic effects on various bits of hardware. With the slowly/quickly developing state of graphics hardware in the GNU/Linux world it can be difficult to get things just right. (Unless you go straight Intel hardware. I think there is the best driver/kernel support for Intel right now with their active participation in development. For Linux oriented systems, I buy all Intel hardware now.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
He got it working, but it took more doing than it arguably should have.
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Unfortunately, this applies to a lot of things in the Unix and Linux world. I love messing around with all of it... but I'm screwed up! Although, I have to admit that after a long day of playing around with various systems to keep them all working properly and staying safe and up to date... I find it horribly refreshing to come home and use something like the Kindle Fire tablet that is basically idiot proof.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
On that line, a personal annoyance these days is that monitors all seem to be wide screen. That's nice if you are watching a video, but less suited for text. I am mystified by folks who have applications set to take the whole screen for things like reading and replying to email.
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Dennis
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Agreed. Our culture has a strange fascination with screens being as wide as a theater screen, more or less. It is very inefficient for working with most of the things that we work with on computers. And now, with desktops and laptops becoming quite a bit more utilitarian in nature while we all offload a lot of our entertainment to set top boxes (Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku), Game consoles, and mobile devices like tablets and phones... it is feeling even more inefficient than it did.
Strangely, this widescreen phenomenon is a bit of a blip. For the longest time screens were basically 4x3, or near that aspect ratio. Then we got all multimedia obsessed and went 16x9. But that has only existed for a small fraction of the time our previous aspect ratios did.
Anyway.