# Enormous Fonts on HP Laptop FreeBSD 7.1



## schaffin (Jan 13, 2009)

I recently installed FreeBSD 7.1 on my laptop.  This computer was running 7.0 without incident and with normal X behavior.

Under 7.1, though, starting KDE or Gnome makes the computer almost unusable--the menu fonts are several inches tall and only a singe menu item is visible at a time (for example the "File" item from firefox").

I have traced the problem to the fact that the X configuration thinks that my monitor is 289x21 millimeters and running at 1280x800 with a resolution of 112x968 dpi.  In fact, the display is 330x210 mm at 1280x800 and runs at a resolution of 99x97 dpi under Linux.

I have tried setting the DisplaySize to "330 210" in an xorg.conf file that I generated, edited and placed in /etc/X11, but this had no effect.

Running "xrandr --fbmm 330x210" in the X terminal window after running "xinit" by hand and then starting a window manager results in normal behavior.

Can someone explain why the X server seems to be ignoring my xorg.conf DisplaySize parameter or give a suggestion for getting this to work?  Ideally I'd like to run gdm or kdm as a login manager rather than logging in and starting X by hand.

By the way, this is an HP DV5000 with the ATI Radeon chip set.  I can provide more specifics if necessary.

TIA


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## vermaden (Jan 13, 2009)

you can set your own dpi like that: [cmd=]xinit -- -dpi 75[/cmd]


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## kamikaze (Jan 13, 2009)

schaffin said:
			
		

> Can someone explain why the X server seems to be ignoring my xorg.conf DisplaySize parameter ...


Simple and plain, this is a bug. And I suspect it's a bug in a display driver. I remember this happening with radeon. I shall test it on another machine to know for sure.


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## tobe (Jan 23, 2009)

Same problem with my ati board (very big fonts), add option NoDDC to xorg.conf to fix it.


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## schaffin (Jan 26, 2009)

Thanks, tobe, but this option didn't seem to make any difference.

For now, I'm living with starting X by hand and using the xrandr command above to get things to work properly.


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## tobe (Jan 26, 2009)

I'm also using the option:

```
Section "Monitor"
   DisplaySize 330 210
EndSection
```
My screen size is 330x210 millimeters.
So normally X should be able to compute DPIs from the physical size and resolution.
I hope it can help, i didn't tried with only "NoDCC" in section "Device" and xorg is actually broken on my box


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## kpedersen (May 3, 2011)

If you use gnome, you can set the dpi using (as I recall) Preferences -> Appearence -> Fonts -> (Little Button Near the bottom)

This means that if you are using a login manager rather than xinit, the dpi is set once you log in.


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