European Wafaa

Just a quick post to enlighten those that use an Intel 945GME powered machine of a certain pixel limitation that you may not know about.

I'm a full time user of the spiffy new GNOME3 with the fancy gnome-shell mojo. As such it's on my primary machine, which at the moment is an eeePC 1000HE. Yup, that's a netbook with a small 10" screen and relatively low resolution of 1024x600 pixels.  As I'm sat at my desk I thought I would use my 17" Dell LCD monitor. So I plugged it in and selected 'System Settings>Displays' Without any issue it saw my external monitor and allowed me to enable it. I chose not to mirror displays as I'd like to take advantage of the larger screen.

POOF!! :-(

My CPU was getting spanked by gnome-shell, everything was grinding to a halt. I tried logging out and back in, but still my CPU was being pummeled. I tried rebooting, but that didn't change the hammering that my poor Atom was getting.

I asked the resident crazy Frenchman, no not Vincent but his compatriot in crime, Frederic. He wasn't sure if it was a bug or not, so advised to ask in #gnome-shell on IRC.

Off I clicked to IRC, and pretty much as soon as I asked my question - I had an answer from about three people; and they were all useful responses. Thankfully Emmanuelle gave me the clear answer:

The 945GME can only push a maximum of 2048x2048 pixels, so my setup was just too many pixels for it - 1024x600 + 1280x1024 = 2308x1624. Either I mirror my displays; lower the resolution on my external monitor; or disable the internal display (this is what I've chosen for now).

So there you have it, the Intel 945GME has a limit of 2048x2048 pixels. No maybes, ifs, or buts.

I have packaged up the latest and greatest release (0.1.1.1) of the-board from Lucas Rocha.  If' you want a bit more background have a look at my previous post.

I also said that it was for 11.4/Factory only and that 11.3 was a WIP.  Well the progress is complete (with huge help from Frederic Crozat, and his great GNOME3 repo).

Yes, more people can have some of this cool shiny stuff. There is a but, and this is from upstream - it is still in development so you may loose a kitten or bunny, maybe even both ;-)  So come and join the fun and try it out, I've not generated a single .ymp file yet so click on your version of Geeko

11.3 - 

11.4/Factory -