Quite hard to change screen resolution back to normal when resolution is set very low

[Chris Sherlock]

Binary package hint: gnome-control-center

From the great Ubuntu-Girlfriend experiment, on Hardy Heron:

http://contentconsumer.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/is-ubuntu-useable-enough-for-my-girlfriend/

"Ninth Task: Change screen resolution.

This was easy from the Preferences menu under Screen Resolution, and she changed it to the smallest size available: 720×400. However, she clicked “Keep settings” straight away, and couldn’t work out how to get it back because the screen was too small to display the entire height of the Screen Resolution menu. Eventually I had to do it for her by tabbing through the options.

This is pretty ridiculous – you can’t make it shorter and you can’t move it up past the top of the screen. There’s no way I can see of being able to change the resolution using that menu when you’re on a small resoltion – without tabbing to invisible options that you don’t know are there. Maybe I’m just missing something, I’d be happy to be enlightened."

Can something be done about this? Not everyone would do this, but it would be nice to be able to easily recover from this sort of problem!

[James Westby (james-w)]

On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 14:03 +0000, Chris Sherlock wrote:
> This is pretty ridiculous – you can’t make it shorter and you can’t move
> it up past the top of the screen. There’s no way I can see of being able
> to change the resolution using that menu when you’re on a small
> resoltion – without tabbing to invisible options that you don’t know are
> there. Maybe I’m just missing something, I’d be happy to be
> enlightened."
>
> Can something be done about this? Not everyone would do this, but it
> would be nice to be able to easily recover from this sort of problem!

Thanks for the bug report.

We saw this and spoke briefly about it yesterday. The first thing to
note is that the 400 pixel height is pretty small, and hopefully
something that not many users will hit.

It was suggested that we move the "Detect Displays" button to be on
the row of buttons at the bottom. That should shrink it just enough
that it fits in this height, but obviously if you made it smaller still
you would still be stuck. I also think that the clone checkbox has too
much prominence, and moving that could perhaps save a few pixels as
well.

Seb, do you think fixing this would be worthy of an SRU? If so, would
you have a preferred way of fixing it?

Thanks,

James

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. For one thing you could no click on the option to use the setting immediatly if that's not what you want, the issues here are not specific to this application though, the issue is that the interface doesn't fit on a 800x600 screen which is an issue for several applications

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

No I don't think that's worth a SRU, that's not the only issue users will get on 800x600 screens and not easy to fix since it requires redesign the interface and that's only an issue for users who do switch to a small screen setting and acknowledge the change

[Chris Sherlock (ta-bu-shi-da-yu)]

I'm wondering whether it would be better to move the select boxes to the top
of the screen and have the graphic down the bottom when in the lowest
resolution.

Alternatively, could you not make the window resizable and have it use
scrollbars?

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 12:25 AM, James Westby
<<email address hidden><jw%<email address hidden>>>
wrote:

> On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 14:03 +0000, Chris Sherlock wrote:
> > This is pretty ridiculous – you can't make it shorter and you can't move
> > it up past the top of the screen. There's no way I can see of being able
> > to change the resolution using that menu when you're on a small
> > resoltion – without tabbing to invisible options that you don't know are
> > there. Maybe I'm just missing something, I'd be happy to be
> > enlightened."
> >
> > Can something be done about this? Not everyone would do this, but it
> > would be nice to be able to easily recover from this sort of problem!
>
> Thanks for the bug report.
>
> We saw this and spoke briefly about it yesterday. The first thing to
> note is that the 400 pixel height is pretty small, and hopefully
> something that not many users will hit.
>
> It was suggested that we move the "Detect Displays" button to be on
> the row of buttons at the bottom. That should shrink it just enough
> that it fits in this height, but obviously if you made it smaller still
> you would still be stuck. I also think that the clone checkbox has too
> much prominence, and moving that could perhaps save a few pixels as
> well.
>
> Seb, do you think fixing this would be worthy of an SRU? If so, would
> you have a preferred way of fixing it?
>
> Thanks,
>
> James
>
> --
> Quite hard to change screen resolution back to normal when resolution is
> set very low
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/224229
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Chris Sherlock (ta-bu-shi-da-yu)]

Well... the problem is that the app allows users to shoot themselves in the foot, and they often do. In fact, even experienced users who should know better (like myself at times) can have a brain fart and choose that smaller resolution.

If the tool allows you to set a screen resolution less than 800x600 then wouldn't it be better to prevent them from selecting such an option?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

you get the revert dialog after doing the change which should be enough to let you decide to not do that, changing the combo location will make no difference since you will still not be able to click on the buttons to apply whatever you select

[Chris Sherlock (ta-bu-shi-da-yu)]

Fair enough. Is this an INVALID then?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the complain is still valid, not sure what should be changed though

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

* Move the Detect Displays button to the top right of the window, right of the Clone Screens checkbox.
* Look for and remove excess padding
* Shrink the vertical height of the graphical layout section

That should be sufficient.

Note that it would also be possible for the applet to compare the current screen resolution to the apps desired window size and if things look too tight, to hide or scale down the graphical display. However I suspect if the above steps are taken it should be possible to fit it into a 400 px height.

[Deepinthekernel (mark-winder4)]

Well I came accross the same issue in 8.04. What I wanted to do was take some screen shots of an application at a low screen resolution so that when I added these to an open office presentation they would be visible and readable from the back of the room. Naturally, I assumed everything would just work and dived into a graphics mode with 400x300 pixels.

Once I had done that I was truly stuffed. If I had known the xrand command, that would have fixed it but even using google was hard here.

The main problem is that the menu system no longer works. Holding the mouse cursor above the Applications, Places and System Menues no longer brings up these items, but the legand for Icons such as opera or thunderbird, invisible on the screen that seem visually to be under them. Clicking these items also has the wrong effect. Ie none of the menues even work. I tried eliminating applets from the bar but although this looked promising it didnt help me.

In the end I had to restart the xserver, which really I did not want to do.

I think that this is more fundamental than just changing the layout a bit. whats needed here is a) The menus still need to work, and they do not at the moment. b) If you are able to get an app running such as the one to change the resolution, the desktop should run it, however ugly , in a way such that it can be used. There are many apps and some will be badly designed. The desktop needs to be more forgiving of this poor design in some way. Perhaps reflecting the bit that is off the bottom of the screen in a kind of transparent way over the bit that is already on the screen. Or allowing the small screen to pan in some kind of drunken way. Makes me seasick just to think of it.

I enclose a screenshot of what my shrunken screen looked like:

[Deepinthekernel (mark-winder4)]

Actually I really like this idea from Bryce Harrington:

> Note that it would also be possible for the applet to compare the current screen resolution to the apps desired window size and if things look too tight, to hide or scale down the graphical display. However I suspect if the above steps are taken it should be possible to fit it into a 400 px height.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The bug has been sent upstream on http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=545120

[Jerone Young (jerone)]

Bug #343488 was marked as a duplicate of this bug, but we do need to resolve this issue for 1024x576 screens. I am marking this as an oem-priority as one of our oem customers wants this resolved for 1024x576 screens, that they will be shipping.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

I know we're past UI freeze, but just for fun, I made a debdiff that includes the patch from the upstream bug.

[Leann Ogasawara (leannogasawara)]

Reassiging oem-priority task to Kevin to track for now. Will also reassign gnome-control-center task to canonical-desktop-team. Thanks.

[Rick Spencer (rick-rickspencer3)]

reassigning to mobile team to consider as part of their project to address issues like this across the desktop.

[Jerone Young (jerone)]

@Rick
      This is a desktop issue and not a mobile team issue. My bad, I pointed to the wrong bug in my post. I meant bug #343459

The fix by Micheal Terry is to resolve this issue:
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/23895819/display_setting.png
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/23826414/Screenshot.png

This seems to be more related to the desktop team then the mobile team.

[Jerone Young (jerone)]

With compiz on in Jaunty. Users can no longer use ALT+Left Mouse click to drag the "Display Prefrences" to see the rest of the applet that is cut off. Now it is impossible for users to actually use the app without cutting off compiz. Compiz is on by default.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

you can still click on the buttons in this screenshot though it's not ideal

[Robbie Williamson (robbiew)]

"With compiz on in Jaunty. Users can no longer use ALT+Left Mouse click to drag the "Display Prefrences" to see the rest of the applet that is cut off."

Jerone,

Is this specific to the "Display Preferences" applet? As I'm using the latest Jaunty Beta development packages, and I can Alt-Left Mouse move windows just fine.

[Robbie Williamson (robbiew)]

Jerone,

Nevermind...I realize that "moving" the window is not the issue...moving it above the top of the screen is.

-Robbie

[Rick Spencer (rick-rickspencer3)]

It's great that there's a patch upstream. However, the engineers have deemed this is too risky to take in 9.04. Look for this early in 9.10.

Please note that the work around still works. Users must turn off compiz, by going to:
System->Preferences->Appearance
then choosing "Visual Effects" tab, and setting it to "None". This will turn off compiz and allow the window to be dragged above the frame. After this, they can re-enable compiz on the same tab if desired.

[James Westby (james-w)]

On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 18:34 +0000, Rick Spencer wrote:
> It's great that there's a patch upstream. However, the engineers have
> deemed this is too risky to take in 9.04. Look for this early in 9.10.
>
> Please note that the work around still works. Users must turn off compiz, by going to:
> System->Preferences->Appearance
> then choosing "Visual Effects" tab, and setting it to "None". This will turn off compiz and allow the window to be dragged above the frame. After this, they can re-enable compiz on the same tab if desired.
>

There is also a gconf key you can set that allows you to move apps
above the top of the screen under compiz. I'm not suggesting that
it be the documented way to do this, but setting it by default could be
an option.

Apparently compiz upstream don't think you should be allowed to do it,
because you can get in to a bad situation when you can't access a window
anymore, which is why it is not the default, but it would be possible to
override that. Also, I'm not sure I entirely agree with the argument
as I phrased it as you still have alt-tab etc., but I may have
incorrectly characterised their position.

I don't have references to hand I'm afraid, but I found them originally
with a minimal amount of googling.

Thanks,

James

[Jerone Young (jerone)]

@James
       Do you know what the gconf entries are to allow alt+left mouse click to allow a window to move above the top bar while under compiz?

[Rick Spencer (rick-rickspencer3)]

It's apps->compiz-plugins->move->constrain_y

Uncheck constrain_y and the user can alt-drag above the top.

[Howard Chu (hyc)]

I've also run into this problem a few times. I set my laptop's 1680x1050 display to 640x480 to try to watch a video, since there was no Xv support for this video card and the image was too small at native resolution. I was unable to get back to the original resolution after I finished watching the video. (This on Intrepid.) The dialog is simply too big and most of it is wasted space.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-control-center - 1:2.26.0-0ubuntu2

---------------
gnome-control-center (1:2.26.0-0ubuntu2) jaunty; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/92_display_properties_fit_small_screen.patch:
    - change from Michael Terry to make the display properties capplet work
      correctly on screen which have low vertical resolution (lp: #224229)

 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:29:36 +0200

[Jerone Young (jerone)]

I'm looking at behavior and it does not appear that Mike's patch is being applied in gnome-control-center - 1:2.26.0-0ubuntu2. I see it in the queue for the package. But the applet is not changed in anyway for smaller resolutions and still has the same issue. The applet still eat 571 vertical pixels.

[Loïc Minier (lool)]

Same for me; I think the patch has been re-encapsulated by mistake:
% lsdiff debian/patches/92_display_properties_fit_small_screen.patch
gnome-control-center-2.25.92/debian/patches/112_screen_resolution_fit_500_vertical.patch

[Loïc Minier (lool)]

Applying the patch as intended worked for me, I could see the new layout; I didn't play with all options though.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-control-center - 1:2.26.0-0ubuntu3

---------------
gnome-control-center (1:2.26.0-0ubuntu3) jaunty; urgency=low

  * Apply the contents of
    debian/patches/92_display_properties_fit_small_screen.patch as intended
    (fix patch in patch); LP: #224229.
  * Tighten the deps between capplets-data and gnome-control-center as
    otherwise Glade / code mismatches can cause breakage: g-c-c depends on
    capplets-data >= source:Version, not just gnome:Version; capplets-data
    breaks g-c-c <x source:Version.

 -- Loic Minier <email address hidden> Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:05:17 +0200

[Jerone Young (jerone)]

Verified fix in now in 9.04 and applet works for 1024x576 displays.

[Constantine (theaspect)]

I have a eeepc with resolution 1024x600 and alt least half of system dialogs doesn't fit in window height
moreover i cant resize this window with alt+f8 shortcut (may be window have minheight attribute or same)
this is very frustrating