[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday March 3, 2019

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

> Then I saw the hard part curiously enough most intense around the
> scene of the late gas explosion on Geary where the bus's windshield
> wipers could not keep up with the downpour.

Remember, it's great for the water table!

> I don't expect Linux to be automagical to any degree and hate the term
> but usually when installing you get better hardware detection.    I
> see similar problems to a lesser degree with my 1920 x 1080 display on
> this notebook.

Well, thank you for the clarification that this was just several live
Linux systems, not three separate full installations.  That does makes
the course of events a bit more understandable, i.e., sure, why not a
quick check of several live distros to see if one has a trick the others
don't.

It's not actually surprising that this wasn't the case, however, since 
they all share the same X.org software with possibly only minor version
differences (if that).

Going at the problem directly would have involved skim-reading the
/var/log/Xorg.log file to see what happened during autorecognition of
the LCD screen.  However, that hard slog could be avoided by using, to
repeat the saying I keep repeating, the key skill of the early 21st
Century, i.e., targeted Web-searching.  Which is to say -- to repeat in
slightly different wording what I said in the prior post -- searching the 
Web for John's laptop's model number plus other terms aimed at finding
a page where someone _else_ encountered this problem and already solved
it.

Not having any idea what model that is, I can only point to some general
information.  The key term appears to be HiDPI.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI

Often, when you find a good ArchLinux wiki page, you can just stop there
(and no, those pages are _not_ useful primarily or solely to Arch LInux
users).  Moving on, anyway:

https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-woes/
(Blog post is from _2017_, so not quite current, and he's only
semi-competent and a bit of a whiner, but some of what he says might be
useful.)

https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2018-4k-hidpi-dual-screen-linux
(Useful tips.)


A close reading will suggest that it'd be difficult to use those tips on
a live distro, because you cannot within reason change the distro, and 
you would have difficulty changing the runtimes state and then
restarting X11 -- and you would be correct if you inferred that.  Which
points out another limitation of live distros.  Some things are just
easier to try on an installed system.


> Thanks for your clarifications.

Yr. very welcome!

> Well I don't tell them to use Live Installers but to try out Live
> versions of the distributions they are interested in.

Absolutely.  That's one of the big attractions, of course.  But you
should always bear in mind that although the booted live system is
_suggestive_  of what an installed system would be like, an installed
system would be more capable and more flexible.