How to achieve higher resolution than physical resolution of an LCD

compizresolutionxorg

I'm using the original EeePC with screen resolution of 800x480. Some screens and dialogs do not fit into that resolution, so I have to use Alt-Drag to move windows around to reveal the bottom part of the window, but this doesn't work for a particular application I'm going to use since it's basically a fullscreen DirectX app running via wine, so some buttons are just cut off by the edge of the screen.

Is there a way to make Xorg desktop to render at higher resolution (1024px wide or so) and then transparently scaled down to the display's native resolution, so the applications think the resolution is bigger? I do not care much about output getting blurred or text getting too small.

Alternatively, is there a way to switch the video adapter to the resolution above physical resolution of the LCD screen and have the screen/video adapter itself to handle scaling (as used to be possible with CRT monitors)?

I'm using Lubuntu 12.04 so I guess have Compiz installed. There is Scale plugin in Compiz, but I don't think it does what I need.

Best Answer

In short, you want something like

xrandr --output LVDS --scale 1.28x1.28

(replacing LVDS with the desired output name, as seen in the output of running xrandr by itself).

Give it a try. Some sites said that this doesn't work on some systems that are using KMS (kernel mode setting); if so, that's a bug that's hopefully fixed. See these links for some more info on using xrandr to scale a screen like this:

Related Solutions

Is it possible to configure a ‘scaled’ desktop in xorg.conf similar to using xrandr’s scale-from option

I just finished setting up a ~150% zoom under Cinnamon, hope this will help you too because GNOME is similar to Cinnamon.

I started with xrandr commands from this HiDPI ArchWiki article:

xrandr --output HDMI1 --scale 1.2x1.2 # try 1.3 also
xrandr --output HDMI1 --panning 2304x1296 # this is for 1920x1080 at 1.2

Then i wanted to set it permanent, tried xorg.conf but it does not want to catch Monitor sections of config whatever i try. I asked on ArchLinux forums and got an advice to accept it and throw away xorg.conf. Anyway, i think my config is correct and you can try and use it with changing Monitor Identifier. Most interesting part is transformation matrix. Xorg has no option for scaling, but i figured out that xrandr --scale is a shorthand for --xrandr --transform which corresponds to TransformationMatrix.

Here is my xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "TEST" # try changing this!
    Option "Panning" "2304x1296"
    Option "TransformationMatrix" "1.2 0 0 0 1.2 0 0 0 1"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Intel Graphics" # change these lines according to your graphics card
    Driver  "intel"
    Option  "AccelMethod"   "sna"
    Option  "TearFree"  "true"
    Option  "Monitor-HDMI1" "TEST" # try changing this!
EndSection

This does not work for me, so i continued digging. My system has lightdm which starts first, and it needs xrandr commands to look HiDPIish. Then it starts cinnamon-session which overrides display settings and i need to run xrandr again. Lightdm is configured by etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and by default it runs something specified in session-wrapper option. You need to create a script with desired xrandr tweaks and place it somewhere to be launched by session-wrapper. By the way, options session-setup-script and display-setup-script didn't work for me.

Then, in Cinnamon (or GNOME in your case) the best thing i could do is to use autostart feature and add xrandr script with zero timeout.

XRandR – Clone and Scale Display

I figured out that the --scale-from option does what I need:

xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1280x720 --output LVDS1 --primary --scale-from 1280x720

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Is it possible to configure a ‘scaled’ desktop in xorg.conf similar to using xrandr’s scale-from option

XRandR – Clone and Scale Display

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