Insanely small default font size

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I’ve just finished a fresh reinstallation of 11.2 and I’ve found that the font sizes are now incredibly small. The average letter size seems to be about 2 pixels wide and 3 pixels tall. They were fine before I reinstalled, but the previous installation was done on a standard 1024x768 monitor. After I got the cable to connect my PC to my TV I made my TV the main monitor (at 1080p) and everything was fine. This time, however, I just did the installation without the old 1024x768 monitor connected and did it all on the TV (because I’ve been using it as the sole display for months now and have no intention of using the old monitor).

I’ve upped the font size in System Settings -> Appearance -> Fonts to 22pt on everything which makes more text just about readable, but there’s still a lot of text left that’s illegibly small (such as on the user login screen, in sax2, in various KDE widgets and in Yast) and I get the feeling that the text that is displaying at 22pt is still displaying much smaller than it actually would normally do. (22pt is supposed to be rather large isn’t it?)

I thought it might have been because I had the Nvidia driver installed on my previous installation of 11.2 so I tried installing the Nvidia driver again to see if that would solve the problem, but it didn’t.

Does anyone know how I could find the cause of this? Are the some config files I should post up so people can see if something strange has been configured during the initial installation?

I did take a small section of a screen shot so I could show exactly what’s wrong, but I can’t seem to find a way to attach a small image to my post.

2

Hi
Rather than the font size, check the DPI settings. Use the command;


xdpyinfo |grep resol

then adjust in the appearance settings (advanced?)

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.45-0.1-default
up 9 days 15:24, 3 users, load average: 0.04, 0.14, 0.12
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - CUDA Driver Version: 190.53

3

Thanks for the reply. I tried the command and the output was

resolution:    30x30 dots per inch

.

Should it not be 92x92 (or something in the 90’s), and if so, where’s the correct place to change it?

4

You were almost there - DPIs can be set via KDEs systemsettings → Appearance → Fonts.

5

Hi
Yikes! There is something wrong there with your display driver, it
should be at least in the 90’s.

Can you pipe the output to a file and paste on somewhere like


xdpyinfo > xdpyinfo.txt

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.45-0.1-default
up 9 days 20:23, 3 users, load average: 0.16, 0.11, 0.09
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - CUDA Driver Version: 190.53

6

Yeah. I actually tried that one, but I didn’t know the changes wouldn’t take effect until I’d restarted because the text that popped up to tell me about when the changes would take effect was illegible. So after I saw no apparent change, I put it back to the initial setting in case it was something I should not have changed.

I’ve used the force DPI settings now. So text looks normal inside KDE, but it’s still not right system-wide. I’m guessing the problem is somewhere at a lower level than KDE because there are still problems outside of KDE.

If it gives us a chance of finding the cause of this and hopefully making Suse that little bit better, then I’d be glad to. The output can be found at name of display: :0.0 vers - Anonymous - Mzfq6ym0 - Pastebin.com

You think it could be that my TV told the installer some really stupid DPI setting (or just nothing at all and so the installer had to just take a wild guess)?

When I was trying to figure out what was wrong, I booted in at run level 3, logged in as root and started Sax2. Again, the text in Sax2 (but not on the CLI) was extremely small so I couldn’t do anything, but after exiting Sax2 back to the CLI, all of the text on the CLI was messed up (even though I had made no changes in Sax2). The text seemed slightly too large for each line it was on and rather more blocky than usual.

I’ll do the same again when I boot for the first time tomorrow morning to see if the problem still happens (which I’m assuming it will do given that the only fix applied so far is through KDE).

Oh and just in case it isn’t obvious and is relevant, the output from xdpyinfo (that still shows 30x30) was taken after forcing DPI settings in KDE.

7

Everything outside of KDE is still rather screwy.

What do I need to do to set the proper DPI settings for the entire system so that xdpyinfo shows 96?

8

Ok. So I had a bit of a read on the wiki.x.org site and found that you don’t set the DPI directly, but instead you set the screen size and resolution, and X figures out the DPI for its self. So I had a look at the screen size in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and found that it was indeed way out.

I actually measured my screen to the millimetre and edited my xorg.conf file with the correct values (or at least much more correct than they were before): 818mm wide and 460mm in height. So I saved the edit and just restarted my PC to see if it’d fix things. As it turns out, it didn’t. Thanks to a command I noticed on wiki.x.org I saw that the output from xdpyinfo still says the incorrect screen size for my display. The command was

xdpyinfo | grep dimensions

which gives the output of

dimensions:    1920x1080 pixels (1626x914 millimeters)

which is completely wrong so I thought that perhaps something else must be overriding or pre-empting the value in my xorg.conf file. The only thing I could think of that might do something like that is Sax2. So I started up Sax2 and had a quick look at what the config said in there.

The only thing wrong in there was the aspect ratio. It had my aspect ratio as 16:10. So I corrected that to 16:9 and applied what I noticed to be a correction on my screen size measurements. I had entered 818mmx460mm as the screen dimensions in xorg.conf, but Sax corrected my measurements and took a millimetre off the width so that it was 817x460.

I applied the settings and thought that this time it must be right now, but it still isn’t.

So, does anyone know what on earth could be making Xorg ignore the dimension setting stated in xorg.conf and apply the wildly inaccurate setting of 1626x914 millimeters as my screen size?

I know that any command line DPI settings applied override the values set in xorg.conf, but I wouldn’t know how to stop my PC in the middle of the boot process and apply a wildly inaccurate DPI setting even if I wanted to.

Anyone got any ideas what could be overriding my xorg.conf?

9
  1. I would try backing up (rename) your existing xorg.conf and try booting without it:

mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.temp

BTW, does safe mode display fonts sensibly?

  1. It might be a good idea to use nopaste to upload your /var/log/Xorg.0.log and post the URL here so we can take a closer look at what might be happening. It almost certainly will have something to do with the X-server autodetection.

  2. In the meantime, you could try playing with xrandr. RandR 1.2 has a DPI config option which might work for you. (I haven’t tried this however). See man xrandr

10

I tried renaming my xorg.conf file (to backup.xorg.conf), but it didn’t make any noticeable difference.

I booted normally (not into safe mode) after renaming the xorg.conf file and then pasted the contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log up to the site you suggested. The URL is Pastebin - Nopaste - Paste - easy sharing of text and codes

After pasting up the contents of the Xorg.0.log file I rebooted into safe mode which makes the text much easier to read, but I wasn’t sure if that was just because the resolution had been dropped so much. So I used the command

stephen@home:~> xdpyinfo | grep "resolution\|dimensions"
  dimensions:    1024x768 pixels (271x203 millimeters)
  resolution:    96x96 dots per inch

which showed that it’s actually a combination of a higher DPI and a greatly reduced resolution.

I think I’ll leave the RandR 1.2 thing alone for now, though. I read on wiki.x.org that a user’s graphics card needs to support RandR and my graphics card is rather old so I assume that it’s too old to support it.

#hwinfo --gfxcard | grep Model
  Model: "nVidia GeForce FX 5600"
11

Start system in runlevel 3

  1. Install NVIDIA driver for your card
  2. Remove /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  3. Reboot

I manage machines having this card, works great. I suggest you follow the Graphical Guide and install the driver “the hard way”, which is not hard at all these days. The problem you have is entirely related to not having the NVIDIA driver running properly.

12

@Knurpht: The original post suggests that the nvidia driver is already being used and his /var/log/Xorg.0.log results show

(==) NVIDIA(0): Depth 24, (==) framebuffer bpp 32

(==) NVIDIA(0): RGB weight 888

(==) NVIDIA(0): Default visual is TrueColor

(==) NVIDIA(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0)

(**) NVIDIA(0): Enabling RENDER acceleration

(II) NVIDIA(0): Support for GLX with the Damage and Composite X extensions is

(II) NVIDIA(0): enabled.

(II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU GeForce FX 5600 (NV31) at PCI:1:0:0 (GPU-0)

(–) NVIDIA(0): Memory: 262144 kBytes

(–) NVIDIA(0): VideoBIOS: 04.31.20.39.00

(II) NVIDIA(0): Detected AGP rate: 8X

(–) NVIDIA(0): Interlaced video modes are supported on this GPU

(–) NVIDIA(0): Connected display device(s) on GeForce FX 5600 at PCI:1:0:0:

(–) NVIDIA(0): TSB TOSHIBA-TV (DFP-0)

(–) NVIDIA(0): TSB TOSHIBA-TV (DFP-0): 140.4 MHz maximum pixel clock

(–) NVIDIA(0): TSB TOSHIBA-TV (DFP-0): Internal Dual Link TMDS

(II) NVIDIA(0): Assigned Display Device: DFP-0

(==) NVIDIA(0):

(==) NVIDIA(0): No modes were requested; the default mode “nvidia-auto-select”

(==) NVIDIA(0): will be used as the requested mode.

(==) NVIDIA(0):

(II) NVIDIA(0): Validated modes:

(II) NVIDIA(0): “nvidia-auto-select”

(II) NVIDIA(0): Virtual screen size determined to be 1920 x 1080

(–) NVIDIA(0): DPI set to (30, 30); computed from “UseEdidDpi” X config

(–) NVIDIA(0): option

(==) NVIDIA(0): Enabling 32-bit ARGB GLX visuals.

The DPI setting is coming from incorrect EDID info from his display device.

@Stephen_Philbin: Give Knurpht’s advice a go, even if it means uninstalling, then reinstalling the nvidia drivers as per his suggested method.

Normally, I wouldn’t advocate this, but if you’re happy to experiment a bit, you could reinstate your xorg.conf (not needed by most users) and include

Option “UseEdidDpi” “false”

to disable the problematic EDID, but you will then need to make sure you include the screen dimensions and any desired display modes. A useful reference:

Xorg - ArchWiki

I accept in advance that there may be better solutions to this (eg use another monitor?). I guess one could also try the nouveau driver instead. Suggestions?

13

I don’t have another display device to use and I don’t know anything about this nouveau driver, but I’d rather just fix this properly anyway. It gives me the chance to learn a little bit more about Linux and hopefully it’ll be helpful to anyone else that might have similar problems in the future. :smiley:

I only highlighted that line about the nouveau driver because I thought it might have been part of the problem.

I do indeed have the nVidia driver installed the so-called “hard way”. I prefer to install it that way because I think it’s actually very easy and it means I don’t have to worry about problems with repositories. If this EDID information that my TV is providing is incorrect then it sounds like your suggestion to disable it and specify the screen dimensions in the xorg.conf file would be the best possible solution. Especially since I already have the correct screen dimensions set in my backed up config file.

So I’ll just reinstate my previous config file, add the ignore EDID option, reboot and post back with the results.

14

And as if by magic, it’s fixed! :smiley:

The default fonts in KDE are a bit small, so I’m just bumping them up a point or two, but everything is pretty much perfect now. Fonts look much smoother and the login screen is actually legible now. I also suspect that the CLI won’t collapse into a pixelated mess anymore after having a GUI running previously.

Many, many thanks for helping to get this fixed. :smiley:

15

Actually, after a quick check I have found that the CLI still collapses into a pixelated mess after having a GUI running previously (like when changing between Ctrl + Alt + [F6/F7/F10] and so on). I guess that must be a separate problem, but everything else it great so thanks muchly. :smiley:

16

The terminal use straight old VGA and does not use the driver. You can set the vga mode at boot. Once you find the value that works well you can set it in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

VESA BIOS Extensions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

17

Well that’s what’s weird about the CLI strangeness. It doesn’t happen until after booting. The Grub boot menu does have a VGA setting for the normal Suse boot option. I think it’s vga=317. Everything looks fine during initial boot. If I press escape whilst booting to get the verbose booting all of the text looks perfectly fine (as does the boot menu its self). It only goes all pixelated and becomes illegible after a GUI (namely KDE) has been started and then moved out of. For example when viewing the output during shutdown or doing something like Ctrl + Alt + F10 or Ctrl + Alt + F6.

18

Glad to read that disabling EDID sorted your DPI issue. I haven’t seen monitors giving this sort of trouble for a while now, and it was only a few years ago when xorg configuration was an entirely manual process. :slight_smile: