On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 07:59:15 -0700 "Mark Knecht" <markknecht(a)gmail.com> wrote: I have a Samsung LCD on my studio computer as well, it's quite nice. It was quite affordable, and does the trick for me in the studio. Plus I really like not having a CRT hum to purge from the system! -- ====================================================================== Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh(a)brainiac.com Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa

On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 8:26 AM, Dave Phillips <dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com> wrote: You'll have to research that but look for the ones with 3000:1 contrast and 2mS response time. My son has one and it's fantastic. Cost us about $325 last Christmas so I'm sure you can get it for the $250-$285 price by now. Watch for the cables that come with your new monitor. A few of the newest models are only coming with DVI/HDMI type interfaces and one required that you spend more money for a VGA interface cable. Good luck, Mark

"Loki Davison" &lt;loki.davison(a)gmail.com&gt; writes: Only if your video card has poor-quality analogue output (which is the case for a lot of modern cards -- I've never seen an NVidia card that produces acceptable analogue output, for example). With my cheapie Radeon 9200, the analogue and digital outputs are indistinguishable when displayed on a 1600x1200 LCD, which is extremely handy for multihead. -- Adam Sampson &lt;ats(a)offog.org&gt; <http://offog.org/>

Mark Knecht wrote: Hi Mark, Well, I purchased a Westinghouse L2210NW at Best Buy for ~$270, about as good a price as I could get on the Samsung you recommended. I've yet to configure it, but it meets the exact same specs you advised for the Samsung, so I decided to buy it. So far, so good. The display is *huge*, and I'm hoping that a few annoyances wil be cleared up after I fully configure it for my nVidia 7600GS. I plan to purchase one of those Samsungs for the main room, as soon as the cash reserves are up again. Any suggestions for xorg.conf ? I figure to just let the nVidia configurator do its stuff, then I'll tweak as needed. I also bought a 4-slice toaster, but it doesn't run Linux. :( As always, thanks for the help, it is most appreciated here in the hinterlands. Btw, did anyone else happen to read about the Wall Street Journal's "interviews" with residents of Findlay OH ? Yep, that's my hometown, and yep, this place is filled with knee-jerk reactionaries. Best, dp

Joe Hartley wrote: I need 3D with Pd/GEM, AVSynthesis, and some other OpenGL-based stuff. Trust me, folks, as soon as the ATI stuff is fully supported by open-source drivers capable of accelerated 3D then I'll get one of their cards. Until then, I need to stick with the nVidia drivers. Best, dp

Am Sonntag, 13. Juli 2008 schrieb Mark Knecht: wrote: There is no system-overhead from re-calculating the pixels. Its done by the screen itself. But it usually looks ugly, so it is best to use the fixed maximum resolution of the flat-panel. Even if you set the base font size to bigger values. (Makes you find bad ui design in apps...) I do have a microwave where I am looking for a plug for a real keyboard... Arnold -- visit http://www.arnoldarts.de/ --- Hi, I am a .signature virus. Please copy me into your ~/.signature and send me to all your contacts. After a month or so log in as root and do a "rm -rf /". Or ask your administrator to do so...

EDID firmware resides in the monitor itself. You should never have to worry about it, unless something is shot on your monitor. X-Org will probe it for some basic information about your panel, to use in its configuration. I did have to access it once, when I suspected my brand new monitor was dead. I had to dig out the full results of what was in the EDID to figure out what was wrong, and that it was a problem within the monitor. This was with a band new Samsung funnily enough. However I called up Samsung with this information, and within a half hour of being on the phone with them(One transfer as the person I got in touch with the first time was obviously entry level tech support and they realised very quickly I knew more than they did about it so they transferred me up to the higher ups), they were shipping out a new monitor to me to a local UPS store since I wasn't home most of the day, where I did my exchange there. Couldn't be happier with their service in that regards. But most people(99.999%) will probably never have to worry about it. Seablade On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Dave Phillips &lt;dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com&gt; wrote:

Tracey Hytry wrote: There are VGA booster boxes meant for use when extending VGA cable lengths ... -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

Mark Knecht wrote: I'll keep my Trinitron around, maybe for a dual-head system, but I'm looking forward to getting my Samsung 2253BW later this week. I ordered it yesterday. :) Btw, I went to Staples to find a DVI cable. Hoho, they wanted $73.95 for a Belkin cable ! Needless to say, I did not buy from them, but I did purchase a $10 Monster cable from the same place I ordered the Samsung monitor. Again, my thanks to everyone who pitched in their advice and opinions, you have all been most helpful. :) Best, dp

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Mark Knecht wrote: Somebody recently (was it on this list?) sent a link to an 'ultra-premium Denon-link' cable, which looks suspiciously like a simple 6-foot ethernet cable. It doesn't even say if it conforms to cat5 or cat6 specs, just a lot of marketing hype about 'bringing out all the nuances of your digital music', etc. For $499.00, it better do a lot more than that! -- Rick Green "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -Benjamin Franklin

No, it cannot be converted. It would cost you less to buy a cheap VGA with DVI than to do that. - Mark On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Christopher Stamper &lt;christopherstamper(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Brad Fuller wrote: Doesn't a simple dingle do the same thing? (essentially) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Adapter_DVI_to_VGA… I have a crap-load of these things laying around. -Cory K.

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 9:29 AM, Cory K. &lt;coryisatm(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Absolutely not. the VGA knows what sort of monitor is attached (EDID, remember?) and adjusts what the hardware is sending. The dongle just attaches the right physical outputs from the card to the right inputs on the analog monitor.

On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 1:19 PM, Dave Phillips &lt;dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com&gt; wrote: Dave, There is a package that supports reading EDID's from the command line called 'read-edid'. Unfortunately it doesn't work on Gentoo 64-bit systems, but on my wife's 32-bit system it gives readable results. If you are 32-bit (I'm thinking I remember you going 64-bit?) then it would be interesting to see what your monitor reports. It's helpful to have this around on at least one machine. It's easy to drag these light flat panels around to test them if you need to and the reported values help with setting up X11. Watch out about running get-edid without the parse-edid. It may change your terminal or console font. Cheers, Mark Here's my wife's monitor: dragonfly ~ # get-edid | parse-edid get-edid: get-edid version 1.4.1 Performing real mode VBE call Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f00 bx=0x0 cx=0x0 Function supported Call successful VBE version 300 VBE string at 0x11110 "Intel(r)865G Graphics Chip Accelerated VGA BIOS" VBE/DDC service about to be called Report DDC capabilities Performing real mode VBE call Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f15 bx=0x0 cx=0x0 parse-edid: parse-edid version 1.4.1 Function supported Call successful Monitor and video card combination does not support DDC1 transfers Monitor and video card combination supports DDC2 transfers 0 seconds per 128 byte EDID block transfer Screen is not blanked during DDC transfer Reading next EDID block VBE/DDC service about to be called Read EDID Performing real mode VBE call Interrupt 0x10 ax=0x4f15 bx=0x1 cx=0x0 Function supported Call successful parse-edid: EDID checksum passed. # EDID version 1 revision 3 Section "Monitor" # Block type: 2:0 3:fd # Block type: 2:0 3:fc Identifier "SyncMaster" VendorName "SAM" ModelName "SyncMaster" # Block type: 2:0 3:fd HorizSync 30-81 VertRefresh 56-75 # Max dot clock (video bandwidth) 140 MHz # Block type: 2:0 3:fc # Block type: 2:0 3:ff # DPMS capabilities: Active off:yes Suspend:no Standby:no Mode "1280x1024" # vfreq 60.020Hz, hfreq 63.981kHz DotClock 108.000000 HTimings 1280 1328 1440 1688 VTimings 1024 1025 1028 1066 Flags "+HSync" "+VSync" EndMode # Block type: 2:0 3:fd # Block type: 2:0 3:fc # Block type: 2:0 3:ff EndSection dragonfly ~ #

On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 1:21 PM, &lt;hollunder(a)gmx.at&gt; wrote: I think our 17" and 19" Samsungs both do 1280x1024. Certainly you might have one that only does 1024x768 but that seems like it would be an older piece of hardware. If you can supply and exact make and model number then we can probably search it out over the net. How did you decide it won't do anything larger? - Mark

Greetings, I'm writing this message while viewing it on my new Samsung 2253BW monitor. All I can say about it is that I wish I would have bought two of these suckers. I may yet do so, maybe I'll give the Westinghouse to Ivy. Mark, I owe you one. This monitor is an excellent recommendation and I am very pleased with it. Thanks again ! Btw, from the time I first saw it listed on Pricewatch to the time I ordered it the price dropped $25. Next time I order one I expect an even lower price. Such a deal. :) Best, dp

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:23:31AM -0400, Dave Phillips wrote: A man walks into his kitchen and opens the refrigerator door. Sitting there looking at him is a rabbit. Astonished, the man exlaims, "What are you doing in there?!?" To which the rabbit replies, "It's a Westinghouse, isn't it?" To which the puzzled man replies hesitantly, "Yes ...". "Well, I'm westing," explains the rabbit. but, seriously, I'm using a Samsung SyncMaster 225BW, too, and am perfectly happy. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

Greetings, Just a quick update note re: the Westinghouse monitor. Flickering occurred in three vertical bands that would make the hashing in an xterm slider appear to be shimmering, an annoying effect that I thought warranted taking the unit back to Best Buy. But first I decided to try a few fixes, and while fooling around with the monitor controls I came across an Auto Adjust that eliminated the flicker entirely. I post this report in the hope that if someone else has a similar problem perhaps they can find a similar solution on their hardware. Btw, what's the best font configuration for widescreen monitors ? Most things look okay, but some text looks a bit threadbare, as though its dpi isn't great enough for the screen size. Best, dp

On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 08:24:12 -0700 "Mark Knecht" &lt;markknecht(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I have run into the exact xterm slider artifact as Dave. I found that the auto adjust gave me varying results, until I ran it in conjunction with a program that I got with one of my monitors along the line that displays a fine grid. Apparently what the monitor displays at the time you run the auto adjust makes a huge difference in the result. Googling for AutoPattern.exe will lead you to a few locations this file can be found. It's a Windoze executable but has always run fine for me under WINE. -- ====================================================================== Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh(a)brainiac.com Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 2:41 AM, Frank Barknecht &lt;fbar(a)footils.org&gt; wrote: As it mentions on that site, and i mentioned earlier, shouldn't this just be for analog connections? What cable are you using dave? Loki

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Dave Phillips &lt;dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com&gt; wrote: ahh, no need for adjustment with proper (DVI) cables. So all probs should be fix. It's stupid that they sell them with VGA cables now days, my monitor here is DVI only. Loki

Nahh, you'll be fine with VGA. No question this new montir, set up correctly, will have a better display than any of your older monitors. I've not used DVI/HDMI under Linux so I cannot comment on that. I suspect the graphics adapter senses a monitor at the end of the cable and routes video where ever it can. Under Windows I have tools to mirror desktops or run separate desktops on the two monitors. I suspect all that exists in X11 but haven't ever used it myself. Good luck, Mark On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 8:22 AM, Dave Phillips &lt;dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com&gt; wrote:

On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 4:22 PM, Loki Davison &lt;loki.davison(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I agree completely with everything Loki says. It's all perfectly correct. Whether your eyes see the difference is based on the quality of your eyes. Ears are FAR more sensitive. My eyes are very old and quite blurry looking even at real life. It hardly matters to me what the quality of my screen is after the second beer. ;-) Cherrio, Mark

Mark Knecht wrote: Hey Mark, That's perfect ! I'll look for one in town, but if I can't find it here I'll order it. It looks to be exactly what I want, at just the right price, definitely worth waiting a few days for. Many thanks for the recommendation. Best, dp

I just got a pretty nice Acer 22in wide for like $200. Cant remember the name though, I'm not at home... At TigerDirect btw.