Monday, June 4, 2007

Recent Upgrade of Debian (intel's video driver problem)

Yesterday I did apt-get dist-upgrade. ion3 as usually rejected to work properly for its API changes. I was not surprised and fixed this technically. But next, what I had noticed right after upgrade, was the large fonts in opposite to ones before upgrade. Quickly I discovered that DPI was incorrect due to a wrong display size. But it took me an enormous amout of time to fix. At first, I tried obvious DisplaySize declaration in a Monitor section of xorg.conf file, yet with no luck. Reading forums, I found one mentioning xrandr util that controls X's RandR extension that, in turn, responsible for DPI. I modified my ~/.xsession adding "xrandr --screen 0 --fbmm 300x225" as the first command. Most of the fonts became smaller, yet fonts of GTK remanined the same. And only today I found out why. I had been using GDM. GTK (GDM relied on it) loaded DPI values before an execution of ~/.xsession took place. So, I added xrandr command into /etc/gdm/Init/Default. It helped.

Next I discovered XV was not working now (no picture, just blue rectangle instead), becouse of bug in intel's driver. This bug exists in xserver-xorg-video-intel-2.0.0-1, and it has been definitely fixed in xserver-xorg-video-intel-2.0.0-3.