Adjusting screen resolution lead to a black screen

[ab1jx]

Anybody tried a bigish fresnel lens?  They aren't very expensive.  You could make a cardboard frame that fits over the back and sides of the display with the front cut out for the lens which you tape in.  It could slide right on and off easily.  They're a little strange to use though.  https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?cat...esnel+lens

But the lens needs to be some distance like 100 mm (4 inches) from the display for maximum magnification, that would get in the way of using the keyboard.

When I started my last job a couple people were using laptops in docking stations with big monitors, keyboards, mice instead of desktop machines.  Worked OK, and they could unplug and go somewhere with it.  I don't have many spare monitors though.

[moonwalkers]

I'm with Arwen on this one.

For quite some time I was in the 'there is no need for a resolution higher than 1024x768 on a 14-15" screen' camp (for those who still remember those, heh). Until one day in 2008 I got my hands on a ThinkPad T23 with a 1400x1050 panel. At first I was running Windows on it. Windows XP specifically, as it was too weak for the newly released Vista, even though it was fully maxed out. Unfortunately, everything prior to Vista has a horrific scaling implementation, though at the time I was pretty oblivious to anything about scaling. And I hated the experience - that was before my eye surgery. But then one day I tried Linux, Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron at the time, and found out that I can scale the fonts pretty much throughout the whole system by controlling DPI settings. Moreover, if I set DPI to a value that matches the actual pixel density of the physical screen if I set the zoom in a document editor to 100% the page size on the screen actually matches (more or less) the physical size of the paper I'm going to print it on. Then I found out that unlike in Windows I can adjust font sizes easily throughout the system independently from the DPI settings, meaning I can set DPI to match the actual physical screen, and then adjust the fonts to whatever size I want them to be. That was one of the many things I found out I like about Linux. Since then I've always been trying to buy the highest resolution screen I could find. E.g., all my latest laptops have 15.6" screens with 3840x2160 resolution, and they look great. If not for scaling they'd be completely unusable, I admit. But with scaling while they don't show more information than a screen of the same size with 1920x1080 or 1280x720 resolution they do look much, much sharper, and can show more detail if need be.

The point of my little story - you can approach the problem in a wrong or in a right way. If you approach it in a right way you'll get your letters in any bigger size you like while keeping your image sharp, and then some. And if you approach it in a wrong way you'll be stuck trying to macguyver a fresnel lens onto a screen to avoid soft-bricking your PBP or gods forbid to learn a new way of doing things. If you don't know where to start trying to "fix" things the right way - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI is a good place.

[moserwi]

In general, you don't want to change the builtin display's resolution.

If things are too small, (and I have a similar issue), use larger font's or other appearance tweaks to increase the size of the items, (icons, font's or window decorations). This has 2 effects, 1 is that the screen is running native resolution, (always better), and 2, the items, (fonts, icons, and window decorations), are made up of more pixels, so are actually easier to view.

Anyone who remembers the bad, old days will understand what I mean. We had poorly formed characters because there were not enough dots in the font's foot print.

---------------
because there were not enough dots in the font's foot print.

Sorry but this is the most stupid excuse for not willing to stay on proven standards like xrandr. With 1920x1080 i need a looking glass to identify the letters and please do not tell me that to reduce to 1366x768 will reduce the dots.

And no I do not want to install the KDE-Monster to get variable fonts that changes something. And NO I do not want to browse 10.568 options to change some sizes.

Yes, we are accustomed to pain due to stoned kid coders but from day to day it is getting worse and one does not know why. Decreasing of IQ or planned destruction?

[Arwen]

@moserwi Please don't say to me "the most stupid excuse". I am NOT responsible for the Pinebook Pro Linux distros, included software, the hardware or any of the related computer standards. I simply tried to give information that would improve readability. (Which WORKS for me, using XFCE4, a light weight display manager.)

The days of analog video monitors with variable resolutions has been over for more than a decade. LCDs, LEDs and Plasma displays are designed with a "native", (aka HARD DESIGNED IN pixel), resolution. How they handle non-native resolutions is device and company specific. So, wanting to use "xrandr" in an outdated way is beyond the scope of what I wrote.

This is what has been written to assist with the subject. If you find something to add, improve or correct, simply do so:

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pr...eadability

[ab1jx]

FWIW, I use rxvt (still) and this makes it more usable:
alias bigrx='urxvt -fn "xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:pixelsize=15"'
It's probably the pixelsize that's important but I think it has to be attached to a complete font specification. The drawback to that font is that there's only 1 pixel difference between a period and a comma, but they're very different to a compiler. I haven't tried different fonts.

Calm down Arwen, we still love you.

[moserwi]

sorry to bother you with it. No my moans are really common. We make this better blah and that blah and it is not getting better but more complicated as necessary. Just think of sysv and systemd and the killing of runlevels to start on the basics.

For me as single server user I could not find anything that legitimates systemd or ens* or ignoring readable fstab entries and if there is a way to add resolutions by xrandr there is no reason to skip this and do something else.

And I am sure that a lot of former enthusiasts walk away as the do not want to learn new administrations for old problems.
And for me, after 23 years of linux it is time to think it over and to simply get rid of problems that are not my fault.

[ab1jx]

It's a $200 laptop, it's not perfect.  I read that people have good luck with external monitors.  Arwen's right though, the screen has a certain number of physical pixels, trying to change that involves reszing in software which never looks right.  With an HDMI monitor you can usually change the resolution because that capability is part of HDMI, you just change modes.  Different firmware might do the trick here but it's not profitable to write new firmware for old hardware.  I don't know if you can change HDMI modes with the usb -> hdmi adapter.  Resizing at a low enough level is at least fast.

[moserwi]

it's a $200 laptop, it's not perfect.

For me, this is not the point. The laptop is OK so far. Well yes, better speakers, higher sound volume and a touch screen would be on the wishlist but anyways it is ok as is.

I see the problem in the communities as almost everyone wants to reinvent the wheel. I am a good example for this as I created my own admin-linux in 2003 to fit on one of the old disks. I think it was 1,5 Mb or such.

With 63 I am on the way of beeing an "old man" and maybe I am getting childish but for me it is enough to work with one operating system.
I was on redhat, then CentOS and now I stick to debian and I really do not want to change from apt-get to npm or pacman or rpm, yast.. you name it.

THIS is childish! We have the linux-kernel and all should work to merge in one common minimal, lean linux distribution.

What I learned is: what I do not have can't brake... can not make problems
and of course: never touch a running system.

btw: I solved the problem rather old stylish:

echo "Xft.dpi: 150" >> ~/.Xresources

did the job.

[Arwen]

Yes, changing the X-Windows DPI, (Dots Per Inch), is one method that I've both used on other systems, and it's listed here;

Wiki - Pinebook Pro - Improving readability

With your very specific command, I've added it to the Wiki page above.