Xandros and Widescreens

Quite a few people have picked up some of the new 15.4 "widescreen" laptops (such as the Compaq Presario R3320CA). It has the 15.4 inch widescreen with a 64 MB nVidia 440 Go card. In the control panel the maximum resolution it lists is 1024 X 768 while the setting should be 1280 X 800. How can I get the driver to display the correct settings?

The short answer is to poke around in /sbin/buildxconf, and add the new resolution to the list built around line 157 or so. Then run /sbin/buildxconf as root to rebuild your graphical interface (Xserver) configuration.

See http://forums.xandros.com/viewtopic.php?t=10742

Xandros is reportedly preparing an update to address this in early 2005. Whether it will update only Xandros 3.0 or will include earlier versions (especially the OCE) remains to be seen.

Another poster managed to take his Toshiba M30 from 1024x768 VESA to 1280x800 accelerated. Here is what he did:

First get the GeForce FX 5200 GO running under the nvidia driver rather than the VESA driver.

To /etc/devices/ext/nvidia.pcimap add line ...

nvidia 0x000010de 0x00000328 0xffffffff 0xffffffff 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x0

Next add an alternate 1280x800 Monitor to the menu at

Control Center > Display > Settings > Advanced > Monitor Type

by adding the following to /etc/buildxconf.inf ...

Section "Monitor"
#!Description "Toshiba Satellite Wide LCD Screen @ 60.25 Hz"
#!MaxRes 1280x800
Identifier "Laptop WXGA LCD 1280x800"
HorizSync 31.5-100
VertRefresh 58-76
Modeline "1280x800" 84 1280 1344 1480 1680 800 801 804 828
Option "IgnoreEDID" "1"
EndSection

Next edit /sbin/buildxconf and uncomment the following near line 1028 (1052 in 3.02, aka SP2) ...

# print XCONFIG "\tModeline\t\"".$k."\"\t$v\n";

Finally I executed the following as root (I'm not sure if this is needed or not) ...

etcdevset -S -c monitor.1 -t modeline-1280x800@60 -v 84 1280 1344 1480 1680 800 801 804 828 buildxconf

Finally set your monitor "Laptop WXGA LCD 1280x800" in the usual fashion. Thats it! Accelerated graphics at 1280x800. This configuration is reported to survive reboots.

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