Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I have a really old vga monitor

output from wlr-randr
Make: Acer Technologies
Model: AL1706
Modes:
1280x1024 px, 60.020000 Hz (preferred, current)
Scale: 1.000000

Question
Will it hurt my old monitor if I set the scaling?

wlr-randr --output VGA-1 --scale 1.1

what is the issue you are maybe trying to fix?

What specific Puppy version you using?

What is the graphic hardware providing input to the monitor?

bigpup wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2024 7:45 am

what is the issue you are maybe trying to fix?

What specific Puppy version you using?

What is the graphic hardware providing input to the monitor?

Mm. I was going to ask the same thing. Is this a built-in graphics chip.....or is it a separate, discrete GPU?

Mike.

It won't hurt your monitor (the monitor displays the 1280x1024 grid the OS tells it to display), but:

1. Scaling means more work for CPU/GPU, if it's a slow computer that's connected to the old monitor - you might notice that things are slower
2. Fractional scaling is a big problem, very few applications support it natively - everything will be stretched to 200% and downscaled to 110% or simply stretched from 100% to 110%, so expect everything to be blurry
3. wlr-randr only works under Wayland and only under some Wayland compositors (most wlroots-based compositors) - wlr-randr won't work under any Puppy with X.Org

d-pupp wrote: Tue Jan 23, 2024 12:18 am

Will it hurt my old monitor if I set the scaling?

wlr-randr --output VGA-1 --scale 1.1

Not your monitor, but maybe your eyes
VGA is analog, so even with its native resolution you won't get the same crisp image you could expect from a DVI monitor.
Scaling the image down in order to squeeze more information into your real estate will make text smaller and blurrier.

1.1 means scaling up (a 100px wide image becomes 110px wide), not down. Things will be blurry not because you're scaling down but because the resolution is low (110% won't look as blurry with a 4k monitor) and because software needs to scale text and images correctly but doesn't (for example, GTK+ 3 doesn't support fractional scaling - text is rendered at scale 1, then the window is stretched to 1.1 without adding more "pixels" to each letter).

Thanks everyone

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)

Puppy is Vanilliadpup 11 wayland
I was just looking for an easy way to make the fonts bigger globally.

You are correct is does make it fussy. Strangely 1.2 seemd better than 1.1???

In many puppies there is a small utility named "Font Manager" listed under Desktop group. Not sure if this exists for Vanillapup ...but it is has the option to set a font size globally.
The default is usually 96 or 100, but I have mine set to 102.

@mow9902 99
Vanilliadpup11 is still under development so not everything is working yet.
I opted for lowering the resolution. Just got to figure out how to set the refresh rate.
The help show it something like this but it didn't work

wlr-randr --output VGA-1 --mode 1024x768@60Hz

There's no way around this, text will be blurry with any scaling factor between 1 and 2, and a lower resolution will make everything blurry. GTK+3 doesn't support fractional scaling.