We recently received new laptops with a 2160p display. I received it with Ubuntu 16.04 installed with the Unity desktop. I've since installed and use Xfce 4, but kept the Unity greeter (because pretty).
I fully expected to see font scaling issues with the high-DPI display, but something has set the Xresource Xft.dpi
to 192, rather than the typical 96. This is picked up by nearly all applications, making the internal display mostly usable. 10 out of 10, right?
Well, no, because I can't figure out where this is being set. Xfce's appearance panel claims the DPI is 96. dconf
variables where they exist also show 96. xdpyinfo
also says it's 96. Xorg.0.log
has one message regarding DPI, and says it's 96. lightdm.conf
(configuration file for the Unity greeter) shows no attempt to change it. And xrandr
is reporting an identity transformation matrix (no scaling).
My suspicion is that either GNOME or the Unity greeter are the culprit, since the greeter starts out rendered in Flyspeck 3, but then rescales itself after a moment. But I can't figure out where it was told to do this, or how it persists to the desktop session.
My goal is to plug in an external 1080p display and tweak the DPI such that both displays are vaguely legible. But I can't effectively do that if I'm fighting with something else trying to do it behind my back.
All clues welcome.
System Info
- Ubuntu 16.04.3
- unity 7.4.0+16.04.20160906-0ubuntu1
- xorg 1:7.7+13ubuntu3
- xfce 4.12.2
xrdb
to change it. (Not an answer, as presumably there is some much better way). BTW: isn't itXft.dpi
, with a period, not a colon? Also curious why this is making the display unusable!Xft.dpi
is correct; edited to fix. And no, it's not making the display unusable -- quite the opposite, in fact. But if I want to fiddle with it, I need to know what's applying it in the first place, and why every other place to look for DPI settings is saying it's 96.xrandr
, which should come from the monitor's EDID (which you can get fromxrandr --prop
)Xft.dpi: 192
in .Xdefaults, but someone unknown to me is changing it to 96 (as reported byxrdb -query
). I can't figure out when this happens, I only find out when I restart my window manager and the titles come up tiny. FWIW xdyinfo reports a resolution of 192x194 (sic). I guess I'll just runxrdb -query
in a loop and have my shell bring up a dialog when the value changes.