Custom resoltions for the radeon driver?

[duby229]

How can I tell the radeon driver to use a custom resolution? I want to use 1280x800 becouse it is the proper aspect ratio for my screen, and it is low enough that the icons and fonts are big enough to see clearly. I know some people will tell me to just increase the size of the font, but I can tell you that I've tried it and I just cant get it to look right. For example increasing font size does nothing for firefox. So you have to go into firefoxes own setting and increase it from there, but then everything looks disproportionate.

Anyhow to make a long story short I was able to do it with nvidia's propriatary drivers using a modeline, but it appears that the radeon driver totally ignores modelines... So how do I get it to change resolutions to something that is not in the monitors DDC?

EDIT: Sorry I fat fingered the thread title. Obviously its supposed to be "resolutions"

[StefanHamminga]

You can change the DPI (font size) in Gnome and Firefox 3 zooms accordingly over here (ubuntu intrepid).

About the screen resolutions: you can list available resolutions by running xrandr. To add one you must find a proper modeline and enter that as a new resolution.

a nice place to start: http://wiki.debian.org/XStrikeForce/HowToRandR12

[duby229]

I'm sorry but it doesnt auto adjust here, and no matter what I do it just doesnt look right. I dont want to change the DPI.

In any case no matter how you look at it, too many sites use gifs or jpegs or some other static format to represent objects on screen. Additionally every program I have ever had the pleasure of working with (literally) had all of its controls or widgets statically placed at a fixed coordinate. Most of the time you can get away with decreasing the dpi, but when increasing the dpi causes widgets or controls to overlap and get in each others way. And no matter what I do I just cant make the scale look right when increasing the dpi. Long story short, I dont want to change the dpi.

And about modelines, It should work, but for some unknown reason it doesnt seem to be doing the trick. I've tried adding the modelines to the xorg.conf. I've tried ading the modelines using xrandr --newmode And nothing I do seems to make a difference. I've never gotten any error messages in the xorg log, or on the command line. It's as if the radeon driver totally ignores them altogether. I'm not sure what is going on.

Anyhow I'd be glad to provide more information if you have any logs you'd like to see, or if you have any commands you'd like me to run. I'd gladly provide anything you need.

[sundown]

Well maybe you can read this http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9900
and this http://wiki.debian.org/XStrikeForce/HowToRandR12

Are you sure you can't force it with xrandr?

[agd5f]

There are ways to do it. You should be able to force it with xrandr. What sort of monitor is this? DVI? LVDS? VGA? Please pastebin the output of xrandr and your xorg log and config.