Pixelated / low res on Compaq Armada 1598DMT

I've got a pretty old Compaq Aramda 1598DMT, and Knoppix works perfectly except:

When in xfree, everything is extremely pixelated (fonts/icons/background/etc). It must be an X problem as all the fancy problems prior to xfree look fine. Anyone know anything about this kind of issue?

What version of Knoppix and X do you have BrittBS? I'm having a similar problem with an ECS Desknote A901 which has the sis630 chip. I am using Knoppix 3.2-2003-06-06-EN installed on the my hard drive (but booting from the CD gives the same problem) with XFree86 4.3. Didn't have this problem with RedHat (but there were other problems with that and XFree86 4.2.0). What happens if you do startx with the -depth or -bpp options?

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Originally Posted by BrittBS

I've got a pretty old Compaq Aramda 1598DMT, and Knoppix works perfectly except:When in xfree, everything is extremely pixelated (fonts/icons/background/etc).

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It would appear that the resolution that X/KDE is starting up in is not the native resolution for your machine. One of the drawbacks to an LC display is that it has a fixed resolution; anything displayed in any other resolution will look blocky or pixelated because the image is not mapped to the display. An example would be a 800 x 600 pixel desktop displayed on a 1024 x 768 LCD; some of the desktop pixels would map to multiple pixels on the physical display, causing text (for example) to look very strange.

You may want to try some of the cheat-codes. They are documented here -- I don't have a laptop to test them -- maybe someone else can leap in. Look at your documentation to find the native resolution of your LCD.

You might find a little help here:

http://www.linux-laptop.net/

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Originally Posted by Loper

One of the drawbacks to an LC display is that it has a fixed resolution; anything displayed in any other resolution will look blocky or pixelated because the image is not mapped to the display. An example would be a 800 x 600 pixel desktop displayed on a 1024 x 768 LCD; some of the desktop pixels would map to multiple pixels on the physical display, causing text (for example) to look very strange.

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That would help to explain the craziness I was experiencing. I think it's fixed now but certain images were seriously blocky / pixelated while X was starting with a depth of 16 (what Knoppix detected :?). I changed it to 24 and the problems I was having seemed to have disappeared.

I wonder tho... would it be possible to determine the fixed resolution via software or if the size / type of the LCD was known? I have a 14.1 inch TFT and of course the documents don't say a thing about it :roll:

Well, the pixelation problem is fixed by switching to 8bit color depth, but of course then it must render everything terribly. And I mean it looks awful.

This can't be the solution ... I'm going to read further, even though I've hit most of those links you all have posted. Thanks though, and please keep the suggestions coming.