extremely small text with fglrx on HDTV

[deruberhanyok]

First of all: minor rant. Having the video card default to scaling on an HDTV is driving me insane! I have an HDTV (actually a Toshiba 32RV530U which I picked up back in April, surprised to see a review of it here recently) that has a 'native' mode wherein it doesn't require scan compensation. I'd rather have to enable this when needed than disable it all of the time.

Anyways, moving on.

I recently installed Kubuntu 8.10 to try out KDE 4. I wasn't interested in troubleshooting openSUSE 11.1 (whatever display driver it uses by default for my 4850 causes the screen to go blank when gdm/kdm starts) and this seems to work fine (I'm guessing it's using a different default display driver).

Anyhow, I installed the Catalyst drivers using whatever shows up in the "hardware drivers" applet. I don't know what version it is, but I think it said 9.1.

The reason I don't know what version exactly is because after a reboot all of my text was impossible to read!

I once saw something similar: when installing proprietary nvidia drivers on my old system, with this TV, the text on the login screen was very small. But that was the only place and even then I could still read my username as I typed it.

I managed to stumble through to some system settings and found that fonts were set to size 9 at default. This was much smaller than size 9, and even after changing all of those to 12 some applications (adept for example) were still unreadable!

So what is it about the proprietary drivers that cause this? I'm going to try it with gnome tonight and see if the problem exists there as well.

[asun]

You need to specify your dpi or DisplaySize under Section "Monitor" in your xorg.conf. Of course setting that only helps with KDE apps. Firefox and other GTK apps will still be screwed.

That's the reason I'm using Gnome for my HTPC currently even though I'm a KDE fan. Strangely, everything works fine under Gnome.

[deruberhanyok]

Wow... is there any way to adjust that via the GUI? Sounds like the kind of setting you'd think they would include (or that would be set automatically from the display EDID data).

I'll take a look at it tonight and post here if that fixed it.

[deruberhanyok]

Yeah, changing the DPI setting fixed it. There's a setting under the 'configure desktop' bit for setting this to 96 or 120. I'm not really feeling K on this, though... probably going to go back to regular ubuntu for now.

Thanks.