Goin High Def

I recently made a significant upgrade to the monitor my primary system uses.  I knew there would be a bit of adjustment to make, but when I unplugged the HDMI cable from the retired Samsung TV and attached it to the new Samsung 4k monitor, everything seemed to be about the same.  There was nothing to adjust, no issues with the display that I could see.  This all changed when I decided to reboot my pc.

There didn't seem to be anything I could do to make my GUI behave the same as it once had, to fill the whole of my new monitor without first having black bars on the left and right, then later it was all simply a horribly bad dpi on a formerly HD monitor.  One of the first things I tried, was in hopes that the solution was simple, that for whatever dumb reason my video card couldn't see the proper screen size and by extension wasn't reporting this to the OS.

My interim solution prior to this was to temporarily power up my old monitor, attach it by HDMI to my pc, then reboot and let the software set things up as they had been.  After X was up on the old monitor, I could plug the HDMI cable into the new display which would then retain the better dpi until a reboot.

I bought a new DisplayPort cable because it has more capability than even my supposedly HD capable HDMI cable which I bought because an older cable began to fail.  I plugged in the new cable, rebooted to get the graphics card to use the proper port, and nothing, things were no better.

The next change was in many ways a fluke, because it was an adjustment I made which had been working just fine so I had no idea that it could be the one detail to begin to get everything working right, finally.  Before this change, I tried variations on two lines for the kldload of the correct driver, first radeon and then amdgpu and back again.  When that was eliminated as the reason (and it was working though still bad resolution etc.) I removed the comments from what ultimately cured nearly everything.

#WITHOUT_DRM_MODULE="YES"
#WITHOUT_DRM2_MODULE="YES"

And now we both see why I am baffled.  I swear I had enabled those two lines which lead to the solution, but to write this blog post I just went to the /etc/rc.conf file to discover them commented out!  Did I not do as I believed I did?  Or maybe somehow something automatically recommented them out?  I have no idea, so I guess I will have to continue with the other issues which I solved and assume that I must have forgot, that the driver was the issue perhaps.

I regretfully do not have any screenshots to show, which would describe the remaining issues.

Nearly everything about firefox was extremely tiny.  Most webpages rendered with what appeared to be maybe an 8px font instead of a more legible 12px.  It took a bit of time to finally stumble upon the solution because we all know how easy it is to find technical answers with google.

What I discovered is that yet again firefox does things itself rather than abide by the host or its environment.  The fix is done by adjusting an about:config setting.  I discovered that mine had been set to .9 which may be default and this could be reason for some oddness in how firefox is different than other browsers.  The setting below seems pretty close to perfect.

layout.css.devPixelsPerPx 1.50

That was the first adjustment for firefox, as it still insisted upon using a second set of mouse cursors and at much larger size than my fvwm desktop UI, which was distracting and annoying.

It seems that at least for the *nix/*bsd world that gtk3 is used by firefox and this is what is overriding the mouse cursor settings.  So to fix this, or get rid of the gtk choice, I edit a file to remove one line.  Edit ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini to remove the line which defines it:

gtk-cursor-theme-name=whiteglass

So now that my firefox was looking almost normal again, I could work on the remaining GUI issues.  One is to adjust fvwm to have a larger mouse cursor as it is just barely usable size.  I figured out how to make whiteglass mouse cursor theme as an overall default on my desktop as I've always liked its style.  These changes were made for X and fvwm honors them.

Edit ~/.Xdefaults or ~/.Xresources to include lines:

Xcursor.theme: whiteglass
Xcursor.size: 22

My default font size for xterm was also modified by adding the line below to ~/.Xdefaults which may still be a little small but it is much better than what would be.

XTerm*Font:-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1