Centroid.EU Blog

Making X11 resolution work right with vmware guests (1920x1080)

April 15th, 2010

Generally I'm easy going. That means that when something is misconfigured, I don't care too much and find workarounds. For a while anyways. So to give you an example I had my new Kubuntu start up with a 800x600 screen under vmware and it didn't change resolution until I went into the system settings and clicked on the Display config, it then resized upon opening the program. Similarily in OpenBSD the resolution was 1024x768 or such so that there was "wings" of blackness on either side of my widescreen monitor.

All this I lived with for several month, but since I use OpenBSD as my main desktop it finally boiled down to me having to fix it. I googled. First hit had my answer. Someone said to use the program "gtf" to generate a Modeline for my monitor and stick it into the screen section. I tried that and it didn't work. They were wrong in that it was the "monitor" section it should have been put. Once I did that and having examined the /var/log/Xorg.0.log I noticed that my horizontal syncrate wasn't accepted. So I bumped it up to 90.0 and it finally worked. I want to share my Kubuntu /etc/X11/xorg.conf file with you, and very similar modifications also worked with OpenBSD, so here is:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
        Driver          "vmware"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"

        HorizSync       31.5 - 90.0
        VertRefresh     40 - 150

        # 1920x1080 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 67.08 kHz; pclk: 172.80 MHz
        Modeline "1920x1080_60.00"  172.80  1920 2040 2248 2576  1080 1081 1084 
1118  -HSync +Vsync

EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
        DefaultDepth    24

        Subsection "Display"
                Depth 24
                Modes "1920x1080_60.00"
                Viewport 0 0 
        EndSubsection
EndSection

Hope it can be useful for others. Oh yeah, if you're curious why I run both Kubuntu and OpenBSD as desktops it's this: When I require flash I switch to Kubuntu, otherwise I do everything in OpenBSD. Most of the google tech talks I watch are watched with Linux.

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Nothing to report

April 9th, 2010

I don't like putting 2 hackepedias back to back. Oh yeah I relased beta_5 of wildcarddnsd and a patch to that on sourceforge, that's what I've been doing mainly these past few days.

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Random Hackepedia

April 2nd, 2010

The RH for this week is netstat.

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Random Hackepedia

March 27th, 2010

This weeks RH is Dsp.

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WildcardDNSd, new features

March 27th, 2010

In the last 2 weeks or so Wildcarddnsd has gotten 2 major features. TXT RR support is one (which I did today) and NS delegations work now. Before they weren't working right. Also I extended the region support to IPv6 which was interesting.

Although these features are in HEAD I'm reluctant to CVS tag for BETA_5. It's too close still to the last BETA_4 tag. Perhaps in a month, I can consider this.

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Clear skies, no camera

March 24th, 2010

Well. We had clear skies tonight but I had no chance of making a picture of the southern sky. Also looking out I cannot make out the constellation Leo with the bare eyes. Too much LP (light pollution). However as you can see I have the Xephem program doing magical things. In the southern sky at 11PM tonight one should see Mars and Saturn as well as the Moon (further up). Xephem is really a great astronomy program.

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Hackepedia changed its look

March 23rd, 2010

The image for hackepedia will change to this one as the old one is probably not relevant anymore.

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Random Hackepedia

March 20th, 2010

The RH for this week is Windows.

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OpenBSD 4.7 song pre-released

March 20th, 2010

Well OpenBSD has been pre-released. Pre-orders are being taken directly from the OpenBSD site or through OpenBSD Europe (which I did this time). The song was released to the public yesterday and can be heard here. I think the song is good, but it's not as geeky as the other ones IMO.

One thing about the song is the "I'm still here" which in my opinion is a take on the project leader who has been loyal to his project and hasn't gone off and made money elsewhere. I don't know how much he makes but I suspect the house is paid off and his salary is decent. It's nice that OpenBSD is still the way it was 10 years ago. People come and go though but the leader and focus is still the same.

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Digital Camera

March 20th, 2010

My birthday was a few days ago and I got an Olympus X-925 Black camera from my parents. I never had a digital camera before and this one has 12 Mega Pixels! It's not a professional camera but the test photos I took turned out well. Perhaps I'll blog with some photos in the near future.

Here is a picture that I took of the sun with a welding filter before the lens. It didn't turn out great and I had to digitally remove all light and it's still bright which tells me the filter isn't all that great. But it's worth experimenting a little on what the cameras limits are.

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