Re: Monitor detection quirking in control centre

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 12:27 +1100, Christopher James Halse Rogers wrote:
<snip>
> Monitors quite often come with windows driver discs, and these drivers
> are also commonly available on manufacturer's websites.  These “drivers”
> are little more than a list of modes supported by the monitor; there's
> some code floating around to parse these.
> 
> There's also a class of users who have an idea what the correct
> resolution for their monitor is but aren't able to do the magic xrandr
> dance to add it.
> 
> I'd like to implement some UI to support both of these use-cases - “I've
> got some windows drivers here…” and “The box says it supports
> 1280x1024…”.  Given this previous exchange…

>From a control-center POV, this isn't something we'd want to add to the
UI.

> On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 19:32:10 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> >
> <snip>
> > The problem with your thinking is that the display panel is not there to
> > switch resolutions, but to allow easy setup of projectors, or external
> > displays.
> > 
> > This isn't to say that switching resolutions should be impossible, but
> > it's not the goal of the tool.
> > 
> > Rotating the screens is also not a priority, as we hope to handle that
> > through key presses (there's a patch to that effect in GNOME bugzilla)
> > or auto-detection (for tablet laptops).
> 
> …I'm not sure where the best place for this UI would be.  It seems that
> it's probably out of scope for the Display panel, but it doesn't seem to
> fit anywhere else in http://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings .
> 
> Is this the sort of thing which belongs in the control centre?  If not,
> where should it be?

I'm not sure this is even a problem we'd want to tackle. EDID was first
added to VESA 1.0 in 1994. If hardware manufacturers cannot get it right
after 16 years, there's no hope for them.

And if it's a problem with the video card not handling EDID properly,
then the driver needs to be fixed.

Something best discussed on the xorg-devel list, and see whether we even
want something like this, or whether it's necessary at all.

Cheers