Screen adjustment

[michael82]

I received my PBP this week. On startup I recognized some backlight bleeding.
But the main problem is that my eyes badly hurt when looking on the screen for 5 mins or longer.
I changed DPI from 96 to 120 - didn't get better

Screen resolution:
Changing screen resolution in MATE and terminal with xrandr other than 1920x1080 resulted in black screens

Gamma:
try to change with xgamma and xrandr - nothing happens

Only thing I can change is brightness via keyboard function keys.

Any ideas how to adjust screen settings on factory OS?

[inkslinger]

I received my PBP this week. On startup I recognized some backlight bleeding.
But the main problem is that my eyes badly hurt when looking on the screen for 5 mins or longer.
I changed DPI from 96 to 120 - didn't get better

Screen resolution:
Changing screen resolution in MATE and terminal with xrandr other than 1920x1080 resulted in black screens

Gamma:
try to change with xgamma and xrandr - nothing happens

Only thing I can change is brightness via keyboard function keys.

Any ideas how to adjust screen settings on factory OS?

I have the same issue. The resolution means text is too small for me to easily read. I tried to adjust it and got a black screen.

[RotatingNut]

I received my PBP this week. On startup I recognized some backlight bleeding.
But the main problem is that my eyes badly hurt when looking on the screen for 5 mins or longer.
I changed DPI from 96 to 120 - didn't get better

Screen resolution:
Changing screen resolution in MATE and terminal with xrandr other than 1920x1080 resulted in black screens

Gamma:
try to change with xgamma and xrandr - nothing happens

Only thing I can change is brightness via keyboard function keys.

Any ideas how to adjust screen settings on factory OS?

I have the same issue. The resolution means text is too small for me to easily read. I tried to adjust it and got a black screen.

I don't have any elegant solutions for this problem, but what helped me greatly was when I changed the font size in the "Appearance --> Fonts" menu . Simply going from 10 to 11 points made a huge difference, and I can see how it might remedy what you said a bit. I don't know about other screen settings that might help for the moment.

[inkslinger]

I don't have any elegant solutions for this problem, but what helped me greatly was when I changed the font size in the "Appearance --> Fonts" menu . Simply going from 10 to 11 points made a huge difference, and I can see how it might remedy what you said a bit. I don't know about other screen settings that might help for the moment.

That's a simple enough solution. I'll give that a try later today. I bet it will make a big difference.

[tophneal]

You could try using MATE Tweaks to change the HiDPI scaling. That should help with resizing several aspects of the DE and not just fonts.

[buzzra]

You could try using MATE Tweaks to change the HiDPI scaling. That should help with resizing several aspects of the DE and not just fonts.

No setting for HiDPI in default Mate Tweaks. 
I've had my PBP since February, but rarely turn it on because of this problem. I can't even see it good enough to replace the default install. At least the purchase supported Pine64.

buzz

[tophneal]

You could try using MATE Tweaks to change the HiDPI scaling. That should help with resizing several aspects of the DE and not just fonts.

No setting for HiDPI in default Mate Tweaks. 
I've had my PBP since February, but rarely turn it on because of this problem. I can't even see it good enough to replace the default install. At least the purchase supported Pine64.

buzz

(I don't run MATE so I'm not sure here, but) if MATE Tweak doesn't have the HiDPI scaling option like in the image below

You can try using this line in terminal, and just change the 1 to your desired scaling factor.

Code:

gsettings set org.mate.interface window-scaling-factor 1

[ab1jx]

What I'm about to try (maybe) is to in /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf replace 1920x1080 with something lower like around 1200 by something, keeping the same aspect ratio.  I messed with resolution this way on a Rock64 a few years ago because it defaulted to 1920x1080 and I didn't have any spare monitors that size.  The size choices needed to be predefined at a lower level and I didn't mess with that but I got a 1024x768 mode out of it.

I remember having to use initramfs because it's the only time I've ever used it, I was following directions somebody on here was feeding me.

I suppose I should get it booting from an sd again and them mess with the extlinux.conf on that because if I trash the one on my emmc I'll need to open the computer, pull it out, stick it in an adapter and edit it, then put it back to fix it.  Actually I could probably ssh to it, just realized that.  But I've been trying to use the stock resolution for 8 months now and I'm just too old to see it.  Some things work, some don't, it's usually an ordeal between the resolution and the touchpad.

I don't know if it can be changed this way on the PBP, it makes the pixels bigger at a low level, not just in X.

[moonwalkers]

What I'm about to try (maybe) is to in /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf replace 1920x1080 with something lower like around 1200 by something, keeping the same aspect ratio.  I messed with resolution this way on a Rock64 a few years ago because it defaulted to 1920x1080 and I didn't have any spare monitors that size.  The size choices needed to be predefined at a lower level and I didn't mess with that but I got a 1024x768 mode out of it.

I remember having to use initramfs because it's the only time I've ever used it, I was following directions somebody on here was feeding me.

I suppose I should get it booting from an sd again and them mess with the extlinux.conf on that because if I trash the one on my emmc I'll need to open the computer, pull it out, stick it in an adapter and edit it, then put it back to fix it.  Actually I could probably ssh to it, just realized that.  But I've been trying to use the stock resolution for 8 months now and I'm just too old to see it.  Some things work, some don't, it's usually an ordeal between the resolution and the touchpad.

I don't know if it can be changed this way on the PBP, it makes the pixels bigger at a low level, not just in X.

The way I would approach your problem is to set bigger fonts in VT and take advantage of modern GUI scaling abilities instead of lowering the resolution. Here is what I usually do in my distro of choice (Debian):

Code:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

There you can select the VT font of up to 16x32 pixels in size, double the standard size, as well is choose a perhaps more readable shape than the standard one.
For GUI my usual approach is to set DPI scaling to 100% match the real hardware--I like it when I select 100% scale in documents they nearly perfectly match the size of actual printout--and then just adjust the fonts and icon sizes. I usually adjust it towards the smaller values--the default 9pt font are too big for me--but you can also adjust them to be bigger, and most applications will honor your system settings, though some will have to be adjusted separately. Since I use KDE Plasma with SDDM my preferred way of adjusting sizes looks like this:

I put the following in my /etc/sddm.conf on PBP (yes, I still stick to X11):

Code:

[X11]
ServerArguments=-nolisten tcp -dpi 157

I put the following in my /etc/environment (among other tweaks):

Code:

GDK_DPI_SCALE=1.63

Finally, I adjust the font sizes in System Settings->Fonts->Adjust All Fonts and icon sizes in System Settings->Icons->Configure Icon Sizes. Both can be adjusted towards smaller and larger, with larger I believe what you would want.
If you use Firefox then depending on its version you may have to change layout.css.devPixelsPerPx value in about:config to the same 1.63 manually instead of leaving it at -1.0, as before certain version (not sure which) it wasn't correctly detecting system DPI.

[ab1jx]

Yes but the problem is everywhere, not just in Xfree86.  It was one of my apprehensions before buying, putting that much resolution in that small an area.  I spend most of my time in rxvt and joe and mc where font sizes are measured in pixels like 6x10 or 9x15, not how many points (1/72 inches) they take up on the screen.  I have an alias that starts rxvt at the largest font size.  And sometimes it's fun in an odd way to not be in GUI mode at all but with my normal reading glasses it's a challenge just to log in.



I was sort of hoping someone would chime in and say sure, you can change the resolution in extlinux.conf, or no, it won't work and save me the experiment.  I don't remember if the Rock64 and PBP are at all the same there.