Sunday, November 7, 2010

Netbook screen resolution

I love my Dell Mini 9.

I'm back from UDS in Orlando, and have once again spent a whole week on my Mini 9. It's got a webcam so I can call home, and has bluetooth so I can use an external mouse without plugging in a dongle when the need arises. Although I've tried netbooks with 92% keyboards, I'm not ready to sacrifice portability by adding the extra 2 inches required to fit them. The keyboard on the Mini 9 has the perfect feel for such a small keyboard, and I've gotten quite used to it.

The only thing I can't quite get used to is the native screen resolution: 1024x600 is not a lot of screen real estate to work with.

The other day I was looking at the xrandr documentation, and I noticed it supports screen scaling. I now regularly use the following command:

xrandr --output LVDS1 --scale 1.25x1.25

This scales my 1024x600 netbook screen to 1280x750, which is really cool when trying to view large web pages, or any other application that uses a lot of screen space. The downside of this is a slight blurriness that is, in my opinion, an acceptable trade-off.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like there's a way to set scaling in the GNOME Monitor Preferences tool.