Re: Monitor detection quirking in control centre

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 13:26 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:

> 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.

We *do* have a problem, however, with uncooperative crap like Nvidia.
You plug a brand-new, quality monitor, and the stupid proprietary driver
doesn't give you EDID and you can't fix it.

(I agree that monitors that don't hand out EDID correctly are broken
beyond belief, but they do happen in the real world.  "Change your
monitor" is not something that people accept kindly) :)

Normally this has been handled in the X configuration tools that distros
provide.  I don't know if any of them actually let you create modelines,
and exposing an UI for that sounds pretty arcane.

Christopher, you may want to play with adding an "Advanced" button to
the Display capplet^H^H^Hpanel.  I don't want to make it a substitute
for distro tools.  But something like "scan a Windows driver to see if
it has an EDID chunk" could be interesting.  I wouldn't want to debug it
myself, though :)

  Federico