boot screen res and font colors.. help

[BLiZZaRD]

Running Fedora 7 here for a number of months and I love it, the happiest I have been with a Fedora release since FC3!

I have 2 small problems and I would like some help with them as my searches have turned up nothing.

1st.. My boot/log in screen resolution. I am using a widescreen 1440X 900 ViewSonic display. My resolution is found, is there and when I am in Fedora and signed in (both root and normal users) everything is fine. However the log in screen and from boot to log in (all the start up screens) are not in 1440x900 res. I have tried everything I can find to fix this, but nothing works.

2nd.. Task bar menu bar font color is black, I would like to change this as I have opacity on my task bars and my backgrounds are dark, is there a way to change this?

Thanks for the help!

[Dies]

1. Hard to say without knowing anything about your hardware...

2. You can edit the theme file

but again hard to say without knowing what desktop environment....

[BLiZZaRD]

Running Fedora 7 32 bit on Dell Dimension E520, AMD 64 bit dual core, blah blah what do you need to know?

Gnome Desktop Environment etc etc.

[Dies]

Video card? Driver?

But if it's too much of a pain then don't worry about it. I know I won't.

[stevea]

From boot to login-promt you may like the impact of setting the vga size, but adding "vga=794" or similar to the tail of the 'kernel' line in grub.conf. See the kernel source tree Documentation directory for the proper values for vga=. This makes the VGA show more lines and width.

The splash screens during bootup are I think fixed size - but maybe I'm wrong.

The login screen is the same Xsession that the user inherits (no ?), so it is the same res. I suspect perhaps it's using different fonts & font-size so it may look rough. You can undoubtedly change it and the login font res if you hunt through the login screen setup.

[BLiZZaRD]

Well, dies.. I don't know what you need to know, which is why I asked. I could tell you the color and position of the case and USB ports but I doubt that will help you.

I have searched, prodded, and tried things for the last 3 months on my own, with no luck. So I figured I would ask here. Is it hardware? Software? System itself? A driver? Some setting in a conf file somewhere? I don't know that's why I asked.

It probably would be easier to ask me for a driver or MoBo spec than to get snotty, but either way. I understand you aren't getting paid for your fabulous help, and that does put a damper on the quality, so my apologies.

Here is what I know about my system:

# Intel Pentium D 805 Dual Core Processor
# 1GB PC2-4200 DDR2 Memory
# 160GB 7200rpm SATA Hard Drive
# 16x DVD+/-RW Burner
# 16x DVD Rom
# 19" ViewSonic LCD Monitor
# NVIDIA GeForce 7300LE Graphics Card with 256MB Turbo Cache (128 really as 128 comes from system RAM)
# Intel HDA Audio
# 10/100 Ethernet
# Seven USB 2.0 Ports
#Front Side cooling ports and Blow Through side Ports.
# 305 Watt PFC Power Supply

Thank you stevea I will try the vga= settings, although I am not so worried about the boot to log in screen, more just the log in screen. I too, thought it was inherent of the session, but all my attempts to make changes etc have failed. I can change the log in screen graphics etc but they stay a square resolution (like 1024x728 or something) rather than the rectangular widescreen res.

If you can think of anything else for me to try I am interested.

[stevea]

1/ You hav e an nvidia graphics. So you are either using the proprietary driver like from livna or else you are using free 'nv' driver or else you are using the 'vesa' driver. Type "grep Driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf" to tell for sure. This will answer Dies question.

2/ Dies question doesn't matter a bit (people on this forum often ask you to jump thru hoops senselessly). Your Xsession is established by the greeter/login screen and the exact same screen resolution goes on until you logout. I'm 98% sure. When you say ... "However the log in screen and from boot to log in (all the start up screens) are not in 1440x900 res". I agree that you are not in hi-res from boot till the very first login screen, but the login screen through the Xsession are at the same resolution as the Xsession. You must be wrong about that.

What is your evidence that the login/greeter screen is not 1440x900 ?
Could it just be the greeter/login font size that is the issue ?


3/ The terminal is not using X11 until just before the greeter screen. It's using VGA. The closest standard VGA size that fits in your screen is 1024x768. To use this you have to tell the kernel to do so. Edit the file /boot/grub/grub.conf as root. Add this string "vga=791" to the end of the kernel line so it looks similar to this:
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.23.8-63.fc8 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet vga=791

The alternative is to wander out into the tall grass with Dies.

[PabloTwo]

2nd.. Task bar menu bar font color is black, I would like to change this as I have opacity on my task bars and my backgrounds are dark, is there a way to change this?

What worked for me in FC6 to change the panel font colors (to whatever color you want) was to put the contents you see below into a file named ".gtkrc-2.0" in your home directory. I had the same issue, black text on a dark background with panel transparency.

style "panel"
{
fg[NORMAL] = "#c6d8e1" #set panel font color -#ffffff=white
# fg[PRELIGHT] = "#000000"
# fg[ACTIVE] = "#ffffff"
# fg[SELECTED] = "#000000"
# fg[INSENSITIVE] = "#8A857C"
# bg[NORMAL] = "#000000"
# bg[PRELIGHT] = "#dfdfdf"
# bg[ACTIVE] = "#D0D0D0"
# bg[SELECTED] = "#D8BB75"
# bg[INSENSITIVE] = "#EFEFEF"
# base[NORMAL] = "#2ef60c" #yellow "#ffffff"
# base[PRELIGHT] = "#f60c22" #dark red "#EFEFEF"
# base[ACTIVE] = "#3c06ff" #blue "#D0D0D0"
base[SELECTED] = "#000000" #"#DAB566"
# base[INSENSITIVE] = "#d8d0b2" #biege "#E8E8E8"
# text[NORMAL] = "#161616"
# text[PRELIGHT] = "#000000"
# text[ACTIVE] = "#000000"
# text[SELECTED] = "#ffffff"
# text[INSENSITIVE] = "#8A857C"
}
widget "*PanelWidget*" style "panel"
widget "*PanelApplet*" style "panel"
class "*Panel*" style "panel"
widget_class "*Applet*" style "panel"
class "*notif*" style "panel"
class "*Notif*" style "panel"
class "*Tray*" style "panel"
class "*tray*" style "panel"

Paul

[Dies]

Originally Posted by stevea

2/ Dies question doesn't matter a bit (people on this forum often ask you to jump thru hoops senselessly).

The alternative is to wander out into the tall grass with Dies.

Really?

Well since you're such a guru, could you please explain to me why I have to copy xorg.conf to /etc/rhgb so that the Nvidia driver will load and rhgb will display properly.

Or why others in this forum have had to install the driver right from Nvidia's site in order to get rhgb to be displayed correctly?

Obviously, you feel the need to put others down in order to build yourself up and that's fine, whatever floats your boat.

You've probably forgotten more than I'll ever care to know and that's just fine with me.

@ BLiZZaRD

When I ask for hardware specs and get a "bla, bla, bla"

then yeah that's right since I don't get paid to put up with any attitude, I just don't.


And on that note I'll leave you guys to it, I'd probably just lead you down the wrong path anyways, thank god for stevea.

[BLiZZaRD]

As stated before, dies, thank you for the attempts. You get a blah blah blah because "hardware specs" is a very broad question, and personally I don't see how the size of a harddrive, or the speed of a DVD burner will effect my monitor resolution. There are 10,000 "specs" I could list, but I won't. Instead of asking for a broad spectrum of specs you could have just as easily asked me to list the ones you needed to know about that pertained to this issue.


Thank you Pablo I will give that a try!

stevea I did the command and got this:

$ grep Driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf
        Driver      "kbd"
        Driver      "intel"

So whatever that means...

2. My proof is that when I first installed Fedora 7 I had a 15 inch LCD monitor. 1024x768 res. When I upgraded to my 19" widescreen I had trouble getting X to use the 1440x900 res needed for the monitor. Finally I got it, but the log in screen has stayed the same (8 months or more now). The only way I can explain it:

You know if you watch a widescreen movie on a normal TV there are the black bars across the top and bottom of the screen? I have the same thing on my monitor only the black bars are on the left and right, the image is "smooshed" (I have a 1440x900 image) and the text is inclusive to the image, only the input boxes and session buttons are not a part of the image. It is squared and centered on the screen. Once I log in, the black bars disappear and the image is normal. To test I even made my log in image my desktop background, and once I logged in, it displayed properly, log out and it was smooshed again.

3: I will try that as well.

Thanks for the help guys!