driver fglrx - disabling underscan. Making aticonfig command persistent [solved]

[jamo]

So my Radeon HD6320 card is working reasonably now with proprietary catalyst 12.10 driver but I was frustrated by the black borders (about 2cm) around the picture. It seems that the issue is default underscan that the driver imposes. Not sure why.

You can turn it off on the amdcccle from kde desktop and the desktop immediately resizes to fill the screen but there doesn't seem to be any way to make this persistent. Frustrating. Eventually I discovered the following command:

aticonfig --set-dispattrib=dfp2,sizeX:1920 # to set X resolution
aticonfig --set-dispattrib=dfp2,sizey:1080 # to set Y resolution
aticonfig --set-dispattrib=dfp2,positionX:0 # to set X position to 0
aticonfig --set-dispattrib=dfp2,positionY:0 # to set Y position to 0

(where my display adapter is dfp2)

Again, this command immedaitely resizes the image to fill the screen but needs to be run each time you start up or it is lost :-(

So I ended up creating a small script that does the above and calling it from one of the boot up scripts round about where X is being started (will post the hack when I get home later, forget the exact location)

This is obviously not ideal as it isn't part of core linuxmce and the script in question will no doubt be overwritten at some stage when I upgrade.

Any suggestions as to where would be a better place to put this? Or, indeed, a better way to approach the problem?

(This is on my AD04 zotac media director, by the way)

EDIT: I see some references to adding a --effective=startup flag to the aticonfig command to make the change persistent. Will test this afternoon.

[jamo]

OK, the --effective=startup flag doesn't work with the above commands- aticonfig complains that they are exclusive and additional settings will be ignored.

So my hack stands... it is in the /etc/init.d/linuxmce script, line 291. Is there a better place to put this or a better way to do it?

[jamo]

Sweeeeet. Found the issue-

The problem is that when the X-server shuts down it overwrites /etc/ati/amdpcsdb (where aticonfig stores many of its settings as well as where amdcccle stores its stuff). Stupid? Yes.

So the trick to making the changes persistent is to only make them when the X-server isn't running.

I was able to sort out underscan by doing the following on the media director (as root):

Code:

killall xfwm4
aticonfig --set-pcs-val=MCIL,DigitalHDTVDefaultUnderscan,0

In that way, the setting above (default underscan off) somehow survives the reboot

[l3mce]

The problem is that this should only occur or be necessary for certain cards (very popular ones mind you). So this should not be run unless necessary. I might make a "get me a new catalyst" script that does all of this which people can run if theirs breaks. I can include whatever you need included. Should be fairly simple todo.

[jamo]

Hi L3. Yes, this is, of course, an "unsupported" though possibly popular GPU.

As unsupported I'm happy to keep these as hack notes in the wiki but if it could be scripted or automated that would be great. Let me know if you want me to help with that, test etc. Otherwise I'll just update the various wikis as I go.