LCD Monitor Support in Ubuntu

[Shot (Piotr Szotkowski)]

Hello.

David M. Carney:

> I'm thinking of upgrading my 17 inch CRT
> for a 17 inch LCD/flat panel monitor.

Great! You won't regret it. Getting used to LCD make take some time (for
the first week my brain kept telling me the screen borders are curved),
but after a couple months' time you'll start treating CRTs as strange.
:o)

> At the same time, I may upgrade my Nvidia card (32 meg) to one with
> a bit more memory. I intend to stay with Nvidia, so my commercial
> Nvidia driver will probably still work.

Yep, nVidia is currently the better
choice from a Linux user's point of view.

> What's important, besides what actually
> "looks good"? Contrast? Brightness?

Colour. AFAIK, the response times are no longer an issue, but colour
is still a problem, especially if you like editing photographs on your
computer (or plan to in the future), not to mention any serious graphic
work. I was hunting for my LCD two years ago, so my data might be
a bit outdated; still, if I was going to choose now, I'd give the
colour rendition topic a through search. This is the problem of
choosing the matrix used in the monitor, from what I remember MVA
(or PVA) is better in colour rendition than the other ones. Check
out www.tomshardware.com, they had some nice tests and articles on
this topic.

> Is DVI important? Is it supported in Ubuntu? I am not a "gamer" but
> I do use flight simulators (X-Plane for Linux, GL-117, Flight Gear).

DVI is, IMHO, very important; from the support point of view, it's just
a different connector to your graphic card (so the system doesn't even
know you're using DVI), but from technical PoV it's much more. The
signal doesn't get recoded from digital to analog by the graphic card
and back to digital by the monitor, it stays digital all the way, which
means the colours are "more true" and every pixel is exatly as the
card would like it to be. If you stayed with an analog connection,
the neighbouring pixels could impact on a given pixel's colour.

Even if you don't have a DVI-equipped graphic card, it's better to
get a DVI monitor and connect it through an adapter, but if you're
getting a new card anyway it's a non-issue (but make sure you're getting
a card with the DVI output).

> I've used Linux for some years now but I've never had to reconfigure
> my x server. What would I need to do to reconfigure my Warty i386 box?

Issue `sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86` in the terminal,
answer the Debconf questions and log out and back in afterwards.

Cheers,
-- Shot
-- 
 Like most computer techie people, I'll happily spend 6 hours trying to figure
 out how to do a 3 hour job in 10 minutes.             -- Rev. James Cort, asr
====================== http://shot.pl/hovercraft/ === http://shot.pl/1/125/ ===
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