I'm smiling as I write this, because I've only been three days trying to get this latest install of PC-BSD on my other computer to display a decently readable desktop resolution, and this afternoon, fumbling around with it, almost ready to give up and wipe the partition, I finally stumbled onto something that more or less works. I had to fumble, because when it opens the desktop, it was saying that it was showing the native resolution for this display, which is 1360x768, but the window that's been telling me this has only been about seven inches wide on a 30-inch display screen. So its text was shrunk so small I couldn't hardly make it out even with a magnifying glass in addition to my new prescription eyeglasses. I don't want to think about how many times I was ready to junk this whole deal, but I'm glad I didn't. I'm still learning, and patience is one of the big lessons I'm still working on here. (I'm an impatient bipolar, remember?)
So here's what's been happening: Using the magnifying glass, and squinting a lot, I finally made some sense of the miniscule text in the shrunken windows enough to get the display config window up and showing choices for resolution and color and even type of graphics driver. I chose 1360x768, and 24-color, and nVidia as the driver, and it barfed that back at me about 8 times. So I tried picking a video driver not correct for this nVidia GeForce GT 430 graphics card.
And would you believe? The one that it likes and works on (mostly) is the driver for an ATI-Radeon setup like I have in my other computer!! And coincidentally, the kind of graphics card this PC had too, until I replaced it to get more RAM in the card by installing this nVidia one.... So is this PC nostalgic, or what? This one absolutely baffles me. And it gives me a resolution of 1024x768, but it refuses to show me 1360x768, even though that's one of the choices on its own list of resolutions to choose from. Go figure!
But anyway, I did get it to show me a screen with a resolution close enough to what I want for it to be easily readable, even if things are a bit stretched toward the east and west across it. That's really not all that bad, once you get used to it a little. And now that it's actually useable, I can dig around in its inner sanctum and perhaps figure out how to really fix it.
One thing that's really got to me about all this is that most of the baloney I've read about BSD and Linux seems to suggest that the very best possible graphics cards you can use on this stuff are cards that come from nVidia!!! Hah! I've never had such a hell of a time in my life trying to get a system to show me its native resolution! And here's the kicker - this same GeForce GT 430 with its latest nVidia driver (hot off the presses in November) displays perfect native resolution of 1360x768 on this 30-inch flat screen TV monitor I'm using while operating both Windows 8 Pro and Windows 7 Home Premium SP1. So if it works perfectly with Windows, why not with FreeBSD? I don't have any of these frustrations on the other PC with its ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card, and it is also a triple-boot system with the same three operating systems as this. And I don't want to mess with changing the driver again on here, because I don't want to screw up my two Windows systems still working fine....
Isn't technology just wonderful? And the next time I go shopping for a graphics card, just guess which brand I'm avoiding like the plague? Yep! You got it!
No comments:
Post a Comment