Configuring X Using xorgconfig in Slackware 12
In this exercise I will reconfigure my screen resolution of my Slackware 12 using the text-based program xorgconfig. My linux box has a Pentium 3 550Mhz CPU, 355MB RAM and a 2MB VGA card. Yes don’t be suprised it’s a 2 MEGA BYTE VGA.Well don’t ask me how I get this old VGA card. Anyway the motherboard has a onboard VGA memory of 32MB. Again don’t ask me why I rather to use the 2MB VGA card instead of the onboard 32MB VGA chip. Logical sense should tell you to toss away the 2MB VGA card. Hey but again, this posting is about configure X and with a twist. Its title should read “Configuring X Using xorgconfig in Slackware 12 with an old 2MB VGA Card”
Before you start, you may want to and in fact you should google and find the technical specifications of your monitor. Things to take note are the horizontal and vertical refresh frequency. Horizontal scanning is in kHz and vertical refresh is in Hz.
Needs editing
Color depth is the amount of memory used to represent a color. “bpp” stands for “bits per pixel”. With 8bpp you can represent 256 colors, 24bpp allows millions of colors to be displayed
# xrandr -q
The number of distinct colors that can be represented by a piece of hardware or software. Color depth is sometimes referred to as bit depth because it is directly related to the number of bits used for each pixel. A 24-bit video adapter, for example, has a color depth of 2 to the 24th power (about 16.7 million) colors. One would say that its color depth is 24 bits.
Color depth is also referred to as bits per pixel (bpp).
Resolution and color depth are intimately tied together in a monitor’s display. The amount you can have of each is dependant on the amount of video memory that your video card has. Note that video memory is different than regular system ram memory or hard drive memory. Naturally, higher resolution and deeper color depth require more video memory. If you have at least 2 megabytes of video memory on your video card, you should be able to run 24-bit true color at 800 x 600 resolution, if your monitor supports it
| Resolution | 4 Bits | 8 Bits | 16 Bits | 24 Bits | 32 Bits |
| 320×200 | 0.03 (256 KB) | 0.06 (256 KB) | 0.12 (256 KB) | 0.18 (256 KB) | – |
| 640×480 | 0.15 (256 KB) | 0.29 (512 KB) | 0.59 (1 MB) | 0.88 (1 MB) | 1.17 (2 MB) |
| 800×600 | – | 0.46 (512 KB) | 0.92 (1 MB) | 1.37 (2 MB) | 1.83 (2 MB) |
| 1024×768 | – | 0.75 (1 MB) | 1.50 (2 MB) | 2.25 (4 MB) | 3.00 (4 MB) |
| 1280×1024 | – | 1.25 (2 MB) | 2.50 (4 MB) | 3.75 (4 MB) | 5.00 (6 MB) |
| 1600×1200 | – | 1.83 (2 MB) | 3.66 (4 MB) | 5.49 (6 MB) | 7.32 (8 MB) |
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