drakx11 pains

Anyone familiar with Mandriva knows the drak tools (various GUI’s to configure your desktop, and most of them are quite excellent), and most likely love them. However, I noticed one flaw with the drakx11 tool, which is used to set up your graphic card. I have a troublesome screen and graphic card combo, where my graphic card are unable to read the EDID the screen sends to it (or properly identify the screen).

This means I use an custom EDID file, which I need to enable in my xorg.conf. However, before this is setup, the resolution is set ridicilously low, something like 640×480 (which is a pain to use, nothing fits on the screen). So I have to add the following line to my xorg.conf:

Option “CustomEDID” “DFP-1:/path/to/custom_edid.bin”

Where DFP-1 is the screen identifier assigned by the nVidia driver (you will find this in nvidia-settings). The file is not the problem, I created that using a very good tutorial over at nvnews and my onboard graphic card. However, on reboot, Mandriva sets my resolution to 1366×768, which is pretty reasnoable considering the size of my screen (26 inches). But I still prefer 1920×1080 and compiz fusion with enhanced desktop zoom, which is where the problems with drakx11 comes. Where nvidia-settings will keep your custom options in your xorg.conf, drakx11 will not. This means that after I had changed my resolution in drakx11, Mandriva reverted to the 640×480 resolution, and I reverted to a backup xorg.conf file each and every time until I figured out what was happening.

Still, was an easy fix, just me being stupid about it and expecting drakx11 to behave like nvidia settings…