[plug] Shakey display under sid

[Craig Ringer]

caston at arach.net.au wrote:
> hello, 
>  
> I'm just in sid and about to try using Trepia under WINE. 
>  
> For some reason my display is really shakey. Perhaps I have the refresh rate set wrong in 
> Xf86? 
>  
> How do I change this? 

If you mean an apparent "flicker" in the display as well as a 
less-than-solid or wobbly look, then yeah that'll be refresh rate.

XFree86 picks the highest refresh rate for your monitor, video card, and 
resolution. If you have your monitor's hsync and vrefresh entered 
correctly in your XF86Config, you'll probably need to drop to a lower 
resolution. If you're using XFree86 4.3 you can find out some of this by 
running the wonderful tool "xrandr" - you can also hot-switch 
resolutions with this.

The quick fix - reduce your display resolution.

Here's my XF86Config section for my primary monitor. Don't use these 
numbers unless you have a high-end 19" flatscreen CRT :-P

Section "Monitor"
         Identifier   "Monitor0"
         VendorName   "Philips"
         ModelName    "109P"
         DisplaySize  360        270
         HorizSync    30.0 - 111.0
         VertRefresh  50.0 - 160.0
         Option      "dpms"
	ModeLine "1600x1200"   229.50   1600 1680 1872 2160   1200 1201 1204 
1250 +hsync +vsync
EndSection

If you have a vaguely modern video card and monitor, you can use the 
"read-edid" tool to query the monitor and find out /exactly/ what it's 
rated to do. If you enter the ModeLine returned by parse-edid, you can 
often eliminate problems like the tendancy of the output to resize/move 
on the display depending on the current resolution, and also make it the 
same between OSes. No more adjusting the display every time you reboot 
(though come to think of it its been /so/ long since I last booted 
win2k, the few games I've wanted to play lately have been available 
linux-native).

In debian, just "apt-get install read-edid" but I haven't the foggiest 
for other distros ; I just copied that data across from my old Debian 
install when I upgraded.

If you can't get the get-edid/parse-edid tools to work, ie they don't 
support your hardware, you can always just hunt down your monitor manual.