Will people please think about low res displays?

[mattmiller]

I'm curious. What is this well known debacle of a large chunk of the code that went into Windows 4.0.xxx ?

Dear Lord - lets not have this discussion on a nice reasonable thread that has made a good point technically and is going to be passed up the chain at RPi central

[hippy]

Just increase the size of the framebuffer via config.txt

Nice idea! The HVS will automagically scale the FB to the size of the display.

Jamesh's response comes across as sarcastic, at least to me.
The use of "automagically" in addition to the rest of his reply (which if I'm being honest, I do not understand) almoat comes across as "be quiet, its not that simple"

Of course, if I have misinterpreted things, I do apologise.

I think you did misinterpret the reply; I believe he is genuinely saying that's actually a good idea.

Rather than suggesting it isn't that simple; I believe he's agreeing; 'it's a brilliantly simple solution'.

The "automagically" means that things should just work as is desired without having to do anything more, without having to configure anything else. That is; 'you set the frame buffer, everything will automatically be adjusted to fit', so impressive that it's 'as if by magic'.

The rest I believe is that he will mention that suggestion during discussions, but also notes there are some things which should be fixed to work with smaller screens without requiring that solution.

[Imperf3kt]

Yes, I think I definitely read it wrong now that it has been explained a bit.
I apologise about my behaviour due to my mistake.

[jamesh]

Yes, I think I definitely read it wrong now that it has been explained a bit.
I apologise about my behaviour due to my mistake.

No worries. Certainly no sarcasm intended. As I said, it's a good idea!

[mooblie]

How to overcome the problem was news to me; I wasn't aware of the Alt+Mouse dragging trick.
......
And many thanks to mooblie for bringing that trick to my attention.

You're welcome. This other trick below is also good for touch-screens (small or otherwise) driven by a stylus or finger, where right-click is otherwise impossible. After installing/running the following (giving you a touch-screen calibration facility):

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sudo apt-get install -y xinput-calibrator
sudo DISPLAY=:0.0 xinput_calibrator

...this will create the necessary "99-calibration.conf" file.

Then, to enable access to a contextual menu (AKA right-click) follow the instructions in the lower half of this post:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... 88#p798901

by using

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sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf

...and adding those two new lines mentioned in that post, before "EndSection". This gives a right-click menu pop-up from a single touch-and-hold-onscreen. Works on the current Raspbian. Very useful too.

[jamesh]

I've pinged some oversized windows on LCD (800x480 Foundation version) issues to Simon who is currently fixing all those we have access to. Some we do not have source to (SonicPi IIRC) so cannot fix the oversized splashscreen. the obvious one is the SSH pasword warning window.

If anyone does find any Raspbian specific windows that exceed the 800x480 please let me know. Obviously we won't be changing Other Peoples Software.

[mooblie]

If anyone does find any Raspbian specific windows that exceed the 800x480 please let me know.

Raspbian: Preferences: Appearance Settings: System: Font is too big for a 320-pixel high screen.
Not sure about 480 though. Probably OK.

[DavidS]

I've pinged some oversized windows on LCD (800x480 Foundation version) issues to Simon who is currently fixing all those we have access to. Some we do not have source to (SonicPi IIRC) so cannot fix the oversized splashscreen. the obvious one is the SSH pasword warning window.

If anyone does find any Raspbian specific windows that exceed the 800x480 please let me know. Obviously we won't be changing Other Peoples Software.

Thank you.

[ejolson]

A simple solution might be the introduction of a "virtual desktop" which is larger than the screen area and allows scrolling, e. g. when the mouse touches the screen borders.

More specifically, add a "Screen" section to your xorg.conf file with a "Display" subsection that specifies

Virtual 1024 768

or whatever resolution you want to use. The window manager and all applications will see a 1024 768 screen and the viewport will be adjusted by the mouse when it gets near the edge of the screen. Virtual screens have been a standard feature of the X Window System used to accommodate small screens for a long time. I have not tested it with Raspberry Pi, but see no reason it would not work.

It is interesting to note that 1088 by 864 (in black and white) was the original resolution of the VAXStation 100 terminals used in 1984 at MIT to develop the X Window System. Note also that 1152 by 900 was standard resolution of the Sun 3 a year later.

[fanoush]

Maybe it could be combined? I remember I used this setup like 15 years ago with small CRT monitor. Not sure if Xorg still does it but XFree86 had some keyboard shortcut for quick resolution change (ctrl alt numpad +/- ?) so one could 'zoom' to e.g. 800x600 and scroll to see things larger and then zoom out to 1024x768. Could X server on Pi switch like this between native LCD resolution and the HVS scaled one?

EDIT: I remember it right it is discussed e.g. here https://debian-administration.org/artic ... #comment_4
what I mean is that just the resolution changes but everything stays the same so no window gets closed/resized/redrawn

[Gavinmc42]

I just got a Waveshare 480x320 3.5", that Raspbian sort of works at all is amazing
800x480 is much nicer, but it was for testing DIY GUI's I got the smaller display for.
Have yet to try the 240x240 1.5"

Even now I have found Retropie gets faster FPS on 320x240 and it too slow without special drivers on 480x320
DPI is a better small screen interface, Hyperpixel etc.
More DSI screens please, without those adapter PCBs?

Raspbian is really a Desktop UI, not a small screen UI.
HVS down to 320x240? hmm would that be usable?
Scrolling and zooming sounds interesting, I already use that on Android

One thing I noticed running X11 on PiCore the display feels much bigger than Raspbian.
It uses the FLTK/FLWM Desktop.
So perhaps use Raspbian Lite and try various X11 Desktops.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... p?t=133691

Been years since I used Noobs but it has a bunch of Desktop versions?

[PiGraham]

Are there any elegant ways to scale an application GUI so that it works well over this huge range of screen sizes? It seems to me the design philosophy for large or small screen is radically different. I don't want to use a desktop WIMP GUI on a tiny screen and I don't want to use chunky minimalist touch GUIS on a spacious desktop. That seems to require that for many app to suit both ends of the scale they require two different GUIs.

[mooblie]

...That seems to require that for many app to suit both ends of the scale they require two different GUIs.

Agreed. Hence the prevalence these days of different website designs for desktop and mobile users: for the (otherwise) SAME website.

[hippy]

It seems to me the design philosophy for large or small screen is radically different.

Agreed. There's often no easy compromise only tailoring designs for the display resolution or a range of resolutions. In even the simplest of cases it can mean very different pop-up window designs and the like.

The Raspberry Pi home page is a classic case of responsive design not always delivering. It is absolutely fine on my 22" 1080p monitor, also reasonably fine on my 3.5" 320x480 phone, atrocious on a 15" 800x600 monitor.

[HermannSW]

I had no problems with my 7" 1024x600 non-touch dipslay.

But recently I built my first mobile Pi ZeroW and used it in 40x15 console mode on 320x240 SPI LCD.
Most was fine, and most importantly "vi" (I use since 28 years) is cool.
But "sudo raspi-config" did display stuff outside the visible area.
So I had to ssh into the Pi ZeroW in order to run "sudo raspi-config" there.

Today I wanted to add that 320x240 console for Raspberry foundation controlled "raspi-config" has problems.

But I tried to tell Raspbian first that I have a 320x240 LCD (running console via /boot/cmdline.txt appended "fbcon=map:10").

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hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=87
hdmi_cvt=320 240 60 1 0 0 0

did not make a difference. In fact the custom mode seems not to work because "tvservice -m DMT" says DMT group has 0 modes. But then I added

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framebuffer_width=320
framebuffer_height=240

to /boot/config.txt and immediately saw a difference: the console is now 40x30. And "sudo raspi-config" works fine now (although some texts are still too long as the headlines). So for console 320x240 is fine for me now with the programs I use:



P.S:
Just found what the little square in boot log messages means.

This is displayed

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Started Regular■essing daemon.

for this too long for 40 character with console message:

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Started Regular background program processing daemon.

P.P.S:
The problem with "sudo raspi-config" occurs with VGA8x16 font an only 15 console lines on 320x240 LCD. Using VGA8x8 is the solution. There are other fonts listed I would like to try (eg. 6x10 or ProFont6x11), which is not possible with my LCD because of the stated "Note, not all drivers can handle font with widths not divisible by 8, such as vga16fb.":
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/fb/fbcon.txt

[DavidS]

Yes there is an easy to design a UI for just about any resolution. Just make sure it will work in the lower res cases, and at higher resolution use larger areas for displaying things that can take advantage of it (more editing space, or larger views for rendering, etc). If you really do not like the idea of dialog boxes looking small on higher res displays, then scale the contents and dialog box for larger display resolutions.

I actually broke out my tablet running Windows 10, just to see how much of a problem the Win32 ports of some of the applications have. I was surprised that the problem is often worse on the Win32 ports, where the same application would be usable at 600 vertical res on X it is useless at 600 vertical res on Win32.

I guess that at least the X versions are better than some.

Well time to power this tablet down and get back to the RPi.

@ejolson
thank you for the reminder about virtual screens in X. I will have to give that a try on Raspbian, I hope it still works.

[PiGraham]

Yes there is an easy to design a UI for just about any resolution. Just make sure it will work in the lower res cases, and at higher resolution use larger areas for displaying things that can take advantage of it (more editing space, or larger views for rendering, etc). If you really do not like the idea of dialog boxes looking small on higher res displays, then scale the contents and dialog box for larger display resolutions.

Horrendous idea.

[mooblie]

I see the SSH default password warning box has already been re-shaped on the latest Raspbian.

Is this also why the colour box on pre-bootup has changed to a boring 2x2 box, instead of the pretty shaded rainbow box?

[mooblie]

If anyone does find any Raspbian specific windows that exceed the 800x480 please let me know. Obviously we won't be changing Other Peoples Software.

Is the "Edit Bookmark" window on Chromium down to you? It's too tall for many displays, with OK off the bottom.

[DirkS]

Is this also why the colour box on pre-bootup has changed to a boring 2x2 box, instead of the pretty shaded rainbow box?

In fact, it *is* 2x2 but it is resized and interpolated by the GPU.
No idea why you're seeing it that small. Looked normal here when I rebooted my Pi earlier today.

[mooblie]

I'm not seeing it that small - it fills a 32" Full HD TV screen:



I'm using the "pixel-doubling" setting (as it's on a large TV, operated from the sofa) but that shouldn't cause this, surely? Everything else: desktop, apps, windows, images, etc., are resolved correctly.