New User With A Suggestion

[Jesse Petre]

Hello Developers,
I'm not entirely sure if this is the right place for me to be making this
suggestion, but I strongly felt that it needs to be made.

I've a very inexperienced linux user, and decided to give Fedora a try.
This was three days ago, and only just today can I log into linux.

The root of all problems came from the X config being installed with a
default bit-depth of 24-bits.  My monitor does not support 24-bit color,
only 16 and 32, so after installing Fedora, my monitor would simply flash
"input not supported".  This may sound like a simple problem to you, but to
me, a very inexperienced user, I was baffled as to why my monitor would not
display the screen.  It also was not helpful, at all, to leave out X
configuration during the installation.  I could have easily reinstalled
Fedora, multiple times if necessary, and messed around with display settings
to my heart's content.  I am familiar with this.  I am not familiar with
learning how to switch to a virtual console, learn how to find the Xorg
configuration file to edit manually (because system-config-display won't
work -- it runs in 24-bits), and learn how to use an extremely confusing
text editor (vi) from the console.

Ultimately, my prime and strong suggestion is to change the default
bit-depth installed to 16-bits, or at the least, allow users to configure X
during the installation process.

If this is the wrong place to be sending a suggestion, please let me know,
and thanks for reading :)

Jesse

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 10:38:15PM -0400, Jesse Petre wrote:
> Ultimately, my prime and strong suggestion is to change the default
> bit-depth installed to 16-bits, or at the least, allow users to configure X
> during the installation process.

Ugh -- the first suggestion kind of sucks given that probably no one _wants_
16 bits. And we'd really like to avoid the second.

How about this: what's your monitor? File a bug in bugzilla reporting the
model and detailed information, and that way, the auto-configuration can
just get it right in the future.
> If this is the wrong place to be sending a suggestion, please let me know,
> and thanks for reading :)

Actually, this is a great place for it.

[Jesse Petre]

Alright, I'll go file the bug.

Thanks for writing back :)

On 3/15/07, Matthew Miller  wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 10:38:15PM -0400, Jesse Petre wrote:
> > Ultimately, my prime and strong suggestion is to change the default
> > bit-depth installed to 16-bits, or at the least, allow users to
>
> configure X
> > during the installation process.
>
> Ugh -- the first suggestion kind of sucks given that probably no one
> _wants_
> 16 bits. And we'd really like to avoid the second.
>
> How about this: what's your monitor? File a bug in bugzilla reporting the
> model and detailed information, and that way, the auto-configuration can
> just get it right in the future.
> > If this is the wrong place to be sending a suggestion, please let me
>
> know,
> > and thanks for reading :)
>
> Actually, this is a great place for it.
>
> --
> Matthew Miller           [e-mail]          http://mattdm.org/
> Boston University Linux      ------>              http://linux.bu.edu/
>
> --
> fedora-devel-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

[Arthur Pemberton]

On 3/15/07, Jesse Petre  wrote:
> Hello Developers,
>
> I'm not entirely sure if this is the right place for me to be making this
> suggestion, but I strongly felt that it needs to be made.

Well this isn't the developers list, but that's okay.
> I've a very inexperienced linux user, and decided to give Fedora a try.

Glad to hear that, sorry that your first experience was bad, don't
judge Fedora too harshly by that.
> This was three days ago, and only just today can I log into linux.

In future, head over to irc://freenode/fedora as soon as possible,
your problems would have been solved much quicker.
> The root of all problems came from the X config being installed with a
> default bit-depth of 24-bits.  My monitor does not support 24-bit color,
> only 16 and 32, so after installing Fedora, my monitor would simply flash
> "input not supported".  This may sound like a simple problem to you, but to
> me, a very inexperienced user, I was baffled as to why my monitor would not
> display the screen.

It is actually quite a simple problem, but it is however difficult if
you haven't had that much experience.
> It also was not helpful, at all, to leave out X
> configuration during the installation.  I could have easily reinstalled
> Fedora, multiple times if necessary, and messed around with display settings
> to my heart's content.

I agree, I am one of those who is very much against not having the
graphical setup as part of the fresh installation, it was there in
Fedora Core 5. I have had this very problem myself at least 6 times.
> I am familiar with this.  I am not familiar with
> learning how to switch to a virtual console, learn how to find the Xorg
> configuration file to edit manually (because system-config-display won't
> work -- it runs in 24-bits)

Also true.
> , and learn how to use an extremely confusing
> text editor (vi) from the console.

Fedora comes with a much simpler text editor, aimed at newbies, called 'nano'
> Ultimately, my prime and strong suggestion is to change the default
> bit-depth installed to 16-bits, or at the least, allow users to configure X
> during the installation process.

I agree with your later suggestion, I have been told that the problem
will be fixed by Fedora 7, I am not sure how they intend on fixing it,
but I have been assured that the developers are  aware of the problem.
> If this is the wrong place to be sending a suggestion, please let me know,
> and thanks for reading :)

You're welcome.
> Jesse

Peace.

[Adam Jackson]

On Thu, 2007-03-15 at 22:38 -0400, Jesse Petre wrote:
> The root of all problems came from the X config being installed with a
> default bit-depth of 24-bits.  My monitor does not support 24-bit
> color, only 16 and 32, so after installing Fedora, my monitor would
> simply flash "input not supported".

Nope, sorry.

So there's two phenomena here.  There's color depth, and there's bits
per pixel.  Bits per pixel is how many bits of memory a pixel consumes.
Color depth is how many of those bits are used to represent color
information.  Color depth <= bits per pixel, always.

The normal format we choose is depth 24, 32bpp.  You can also do depth
24, 24bpp, but it's usually much slower since 3/4's of your pixels will
now require unaligned memory accesses.  But there's literally no depth
32 format in the X server.

All of which is sort of besides the point: your monitor never sees any
of this.  If it's VGA, then you're just wiggling analog pins, and the
color depth just reflects the precision with which the pins are wiggled.
If it's a digital connector like DVI-D or laptop-internal LVDS, then the
DVI transmitter pads the color information out to eight bits per color
channel anyway.

So what you actually found was a bug in which we appear to program the
monitor _timings_ wrong in 16bpp, but not in 32bpp.  That's actually
quite interesting, and I would greatly appreciate it if you would file a
bug report with the X logs (/var/log/Xorg.0.log) from attempting to
start at both 16 and 32bpp.

- ajax