video: installing drivers and tweaking DPI

With the new kernel, the nVidia drivers can be installed. I didn't have luck with the free nouveau drivers, so went with the proprietary nVidia setup. Download it, then:

aptitude install gcc make binutils linux-headers-2.6.37-trunk-686
sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-260.19.36.run

It worked! But... fonts are way too large. At the login page the "user" and "password" fields have letters so big they overflow the space. Terminal windows are unusable. It looks terrible.

I'd already seen this and had found a fix. The Samsung TV lies like a rug to the computer about how big it is. So, on the Linux side just ignore the TV's boasts and set the DPI manually.

File /etc/X11/xorg.conf, add text in bold:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce GT 430"
# JM:
    Option         "UseEdidDpi" "FALSE"
    Option         "DPI" "100 x 100"
EndSection

Restart X to see the changes. For my system, this was:

service gdm stop ; service gdm start