Drivers for wide format LCD's

[OldAl]

I purchased today 22" BenQ FP 222W LCD monitor - wide format, which replaces my earlier 19" BenQ monitor. The new monitor is designed to display 8/5 ratio screens. My PC is a dual AMD64, Gigabyte mobo with nvidia chipset. The OS is openSUSE-retail 10.3.

Any suggestions where to look for a driver or configure it in some other way. I tried sax2 with little or no success. Currently my screen displays 800x600, which is ugly.. BTW, my mobo video controller is NVidia GeForce 430. The NVidia driver was installed and worked OK whilst using the old 19" monitor. Should I re-install the NVidia driver?

TIA for all the help I can get!

[hugortega]

Hi OldAl,

In my opinion, the easiest way to configure a Nvidia based display it's using the nvidia-settings program. On the 'X Serve Display Configuration' you can test differents options, and once you have the desired configuration, save the options as X config file, backup your xorg config file, and put the nvidia generated options... I did those steps with my wide-screen display and works easy ....

Hugo

[bigtomrodney]

No reinstalling the driver will not help, things work a little differently in the Unix world.

Instead your xorg.conf file needs to be reconfigured. I recommend use SUSE's Sax2 program to reconfigure - you will find it in YaST.

[OldAl]

Dear hugortega, your message is greatly appreciated, but how do I get to the nvidia-settings program? I take it it is a command line program? I would be happy to try it!

Hope you can help me to access the nvidia-settings program.

Kind regards, OldAl.

[OldAl]

Dear bigtomrodney, many thanks for mentioning sax2. I did try it from console (ctrl+alt+F1, login and change to root first; then init 3 to kill x server.). I first tried the automatic fix with "sax2 -a" to no avail - the monitor responded by with a message to the effect "out of range". I also tried "sax2 -V 0:1024x640@70" and a few other settings - also to no avail. Anything else I should do? I would greatly appreciate further input from you, bigtomrodney!

TIA, OldAl in perched Canberra, while up North we have floods...

[gogalthorp]

Run Sax2 via Yast Select a monitor with a close spec and change the aspect ratio.

The NVIDIA config should be found in your system menu under more Programs.It may be the best option.

[waterhead]

When I set up my Samsung Syncmaster it was not listed in the list of monitors. There was an option to get the info from a disk, so I inserted the disk that came with it. Linux was able to get the needed monitor info from the disk. even though it contained only windows applications and drivers.

[OldAl]

Run Sax2 via Yast Select a monitor with a close spec and change the aspect ratio.

The NVIDIA config should be found in your system menu under more Programs.It may be the best option.

Thanks for that. The screen options I get from sax2 via Yast are: 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1680x1050. The 1680x1050 on Testing results "Out of Range" messages. All others are 4/3 ratio. I did select 1024x768 which hides half the screen. However, after i key on monitor (meaning auto adjust), it just becomes useable, so I don't have to run to another computer to reply, though all objects are elongated.

There should be a way to add additional screen sizes in 8/5 w/h ratio. Can you advise me where to look for that?

Thanks again for your reply,

OldAl.

[OldAl]

When I set up my Samsung Syncmaster it was not listed in the list of monitors. There was an option to get the info from a disk, so I inserted the disk that came with it. Linux was able to get the needed monitor info from the disk. even though it contained only windows applications and drivers.

I just did exactly that and sax2 via Yast shows the correct monitor. I think that what I probably need is a LCD monitor driver, but I doubt if BenQ has any. I think that Samsung is more "Linux friendly". I guess I goofed by choosing BenQ (my past choice for LCD monitors for other PC's). So will have find a way to live with my mistake.

Thanks for your suggestion. It is a good one, even if it does not do the trick for me.

OldAl.