I've got the best wife ever, again. That is, she's proved it again, not that I've made another "best wife" selection.

We were cleaning the garage and basement over the last few weekends, and I finally let her toss the ten-ish PC monitors that have been polluting our storage areas, including my massive, but broken, 23-inch CRT. I caved suggesting that instead of putting the potential repair money into trying to revive the monitor that there was a slick wide-screen LCD I've been watching, and we agreed that when it broke $300 I could get one.

A few days later I got an e-mail alert from the on-line vendor saying my price-point had been hit. I forwarded it to the missus, and she ordered one for me!

It arrived on time on the following Wednesday. I dutifully perused the meager manual and set myself on the task of setting the resolution for my KVM-connected PCs to something the monitor could handle. The CRT I was replacing could handle 1600x1200@75Hz, but the wide-screen is 1680x1050@65Hz, so I tuned the four PCs and their six OSs (two dual-boot LINUX and Windows) to something smaller (1280x1024@60Hz) and shut 'em all down.

I swapped the monitors, lugging the nearly 40lb 19-inch CRT to another desk in the office, and slipped the slick barely 18lb 20.1-inch LCD into its place. I dusted the area beneath the old space hog, and rearranged the now exposed cables so they're not nearly as entangled. There's a lot of free space now, and I'm not sure what to do with it.

Well, that's not entirely true. I want to get an articulating arm so I can adjust the monitor, as I do my seat, keyboard, and mouse, when I feel like shifting things around for comfort.

I fired up the Mac first. It worked just fine, the monitor cleanly stretching the under-sized display to fill the screen. I adjusted the monitor in the System Properties, and was instantly rewarded with a clear, crisp 1680x1050 desktop. I was a little worried about loosing the 150 pixels across the bottom, more than I was delighted to gain the 80 pixels along the side, but the display is so crisp, the lack of electronic noise so peaceful, and the slight flicker from the electron gun will not be missed.

Sadly, the Mac was the best experience. Well, I don't mean that to put a negative spin on things, but more to give a sense of the heavy sigh that configuring the other systems gave.

The one LINUX box, temporarily connected to the desktop system, is meant to be a server replacement and will end up in the basement connected to another KVM, probably with the CRT that was on this desk. It's using the on-board video, which doesn't support any of the wide-screen geometry. I tinkered with the available settings until I found an agreeable stretched size, and left it at that. The machine is rarely used at the GUI anyway.

I fired up the AMD64 on Windows. The monitor dutifully stretched the desktop, and Windows allowed me to select the wide-screen size. The display was a little less than crisp, though. I was a little worried, but then realized it was really a font thing; a lot more aliasing than I had experienced with the Mac. I checked the settings and found that the font smoothing was being left to the OS to determine, and our tastes didn't agree. I selected the best font smoothing, since the PC has the horsepower, and the display was instantly converted to somethng not unlike the Mac had. There are still some funky spots on some fonts, but it seems limited to within the web browser, so I'm letting that slide for now, as the system is usually used for software development and gaming, but not so much for casual web browsing.

I rebooted the machine in LINUX, but here I had the least success. The system did have the 1680x1050@60Hz setting, and I was able to configure X with that, but KDE had a slightly different idea, and kept setting either the resolution to 1600x1050 or the horizontal frequency to 58Hz. The screen would either be stretched for the extra 80 pixels, or be half of the "task bar" too tall, putting a handful of pixels off the top and bottom of the screen. Sometimes it would shift up and down when it was sized incorrectly, and others it would be centered off a little. I left it alone, trying to work within the GUI to get the settings to work.

I did the Pentium 4 the same way; Windows updated slick, but LINUX was off a little. The LINUX on both boxes is SuSE 10, but the AMD64 is a fresh install of v10, while the P4 is an upgrade from 9.3 (which had been upgraded from 9.2). Note I'm going to keep doing as I've done with the AMD64 and keep the /home in a separate partition, so I can simply upgrade by blowing away the main partition...just an aside.

This morning I finally entered the config file realm and set the monitor settings to exactly 60Hz horizontal and 65Hz vertical, as the Mac and Windows were doing. I then re-ran the GUI tools, which then updated the other configuration files. After restarting the X server, everything is sharp and crisp as can be.

I'm a little disappointed because the LINUX wouldn't just set the monitor up correctly. It probably has more to do with the fact that it couldn't explicitly identify the monitor than anything else; the generic 1680x1050 LCD montior it does have in the configuration had a wide range of frequencies from which to choose, and the tweaking tool wouldn't let me just select the frequencies I wanted, instead forcing me to step through them, which occasionally set the monitor in an "out of range" combination.

While I don't have a cutting-edge monitor, it is a later model in the Sceptre line; later enough to not be in the v10.0 release of SuSE, anyway. There is a 10.1 release available, but I'm not going to jump just 'cause my monitor wasn't instantly recognized.

All is good now. I've fixed the AMD64, on which I'm editing this entry in fine, crisp wide-screen. I'll fix the P4 LINUX later.

Viva la wide-screen!