eye-friendly refresh rate?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Josef Wolf <jw at raven.inka.de> wrote:
> When I install ubuntu, I always get 60 Hz refresh rate.  This is very
> annoying on a non-flat CRT.

Well, I think it would be equally annoying on flat CRT's ! ;o)

> In the system config menu, where screen resolution can be changed,
> there is a menubutton to select different refresh rates.  But this
> menu contains only one entry (60Hz).
> 
> Obviously, I'm missing something.  Can somebody give me a hint how
> to select a higher refresh rate?


Most likely, it's because when you installed Ubuntu, your monitor was
not detected properly, and therefore it used fail safe/conservative
default values, which has the unfortunate side effect only allow for low
resolutions and low refresh rates.
I often have this problem with my CRT monitor .
The cure is simple though: just edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf,
search for the section "monitor". On my system it looks like this:

*****************
Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Generic Monitor"
        Option          "DPMS"
        HorizSync       31-69
        VertRefresh     55-120
EndSection
*****************

All you have to do is replace the default values with the correct
values for your monitor. Once upon a time, there was a little command
by the name of "ddcprobe", that would interrogate the monitor via the
"DDC" protocol, which would tell you many things about the monitor...
including the magic numbers wed are interested here. Unfortunately, on
my Feisty system, "ddcprobe" doesn't appear to exist anymore ! :o(
No worries, just dig out the user manual of your monitor, it most
certainly contains these details.
If you don't have the manual anymore, do a quick search on
www.google.com, it should be too difficult to find this information.

Once you have modified xorg.conf, you will need to restart X for the
changes to takes effect. To do that, just log out, then press Alt
+Control+Backspace on your keyboard.

HTH,


--
Vince