[2217] in Release_7.7_team
Re: GX110 looks good.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Thu Apr 13 16:15:11 2000
Message-Id: <200004132015.QAA15263@small-gods.mit.edu>
To: dryfoo@MIT.EDU
Cc: owls@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 13 Apr 2000 14:25:11 EDT."
<200004131825.OAA07586@thelonious.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 16:15:06 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> but rather to emulate the Mac trick of letting people specify their
> resolution mode.
This would be great, but...
> "can't be done"
... or rather, it's hard, probably too hard. Once an X server starts
up, it can't change the size of the display. (Ctrl-alt-plus or
ctrl-alt-minus on XFree86 might change the screen resolution, but not
the display size; if you make the screen resolution smaller than the
display size then your mouse will scroll around in the display when it
reaches the edges--not what people generally want.) So, to change the
resolution properly, you have to restart the X server and therefore
restart all of the programs running which have windows open.
In theory, we could have a dotfile which specifies the desired
resolution, and xlogin could restart the X server to the desired
resolution when the users log in, but:
* It'd be a pain in the butt to code; our whole X login system
currently assumes a single X server process running
underneath.
* It'd be very ugly and potentially confusing to have the X
server quit and restart as part of the login process.
* Users still wouldn't be able to change resolution in the
middle of a login (unlike on the Mac or Windows, where you
can try out a new resolution any time, and set it back again
if you don't like it). They would have to change the
setting and log out and back in again to see what effect it
had.
