Community Matters

Lots of chatter on the web about upscaling the resolution of your EeePC in software (while we are all waiting for the higher resolution second generation EeePC from Asus). Actually, what people are doing is downscaling a larger resolution like 960×576 or 1024×600 onto the 800×480 display in the EeePC.

The first one I saw was the Windows XP driver hack a few days ago. And now there’s a pretty cruel way to do the same under Linux, using vnc.

Why do I call it cruel? Well, it’s really slow, it’s really wasteful of the meager resources of the EeePC and it does un-intuitive things. Ctrl-Alt-T no longer pops up a terminal on the screen that you see (it pops it up on the unscaled screen “behind” the scaled one that you see). Quite a few things simply don’t work right anymore. And did I mention how brutally slow it was?

I talked to Keith Packard (one of the masterminds behind X.org) and he has a good idea how to do this cleanly in the X server with very nice performance; but he doesn’t have the time to implement it right now (and I doubt that I will, either - and the days since I have written X code are long long gone… maybe this could be the thing to start with again?). Anyway, if anyone is interested working on this, drop me a line (or comment here) and maybe we can form a team to work on this?

Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?