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Software - Support => Tutorials => Topic started by: anon222 on August 01, 2014, 12:30:52 PM

Title: How to setup display panning
Post by: anon222 on August 01, 2014, 12:30:52 PM

This might be usefull for those with small screens.
If you follow this tutorial you can setup a virtual screen that is bigger than your physical screen.
So, it's like you have a zoomed in screen and you move from one corner to another when you position your mouse to the screen edge.
First test your display screen size, device, available resolutions and refresh rates.

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xrandrOutput will be similar to this:

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Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384
DVI-I-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
VGA-0 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 477mm x 268mm
   1920x1080      60.0*+
   1680x1050      60.0 
   1280x1024      75.0     60.0 
   1152x864       75.0 
   1024x768       75.0     60.0 
   800x600        75.0     60.3 
   640x480        75.0     59.9 
DVI-I-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
From this you can see I'm using VGA-0 as my primary display device and 1920x1080 resolution with 60Hz refresh rate.
If you are using laptop or netbook, your device will probably be LVDS.
Lets say I want to use 2100x2100 virtual screen size.
I can set this with

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xrandr --output VGA-0 --rate 60 --mode 1920x1080 --fb 2100x2100 --panning 2100x2100
--rate sets refresh rate
--mode sets physical screen resolution, set it to your default screen resolution
Important:Don't use resolutions or refresh rates your monitor don't support for your physical screen!
--output for me is VGA-0, change it to your device for example LVDS
--fb sets virtal screen size
--panning sets panning area
--fb and -- panning are tipically the same values
If I want to switch back I will use this

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xrandr --output VGA-0 --rate 60 --mode 1920x1080 --fb 1920x1080 --panning 1920x1080
Note that this will not be saved to your configuration, so the next time you log it won't be applied.
If you want to save it you must create a file .xprofile in your home directory and make it executable.

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printf "xrandr --output VGA-0 --rate 60 --mode 1920x1080 --fb 2100x2100 --panning 2100x2100" > ~/.xprofile

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chmod +x ~/.xprofileThis never happened to me but just in case:
If OS fails to start GUI press f7 while it's booting up, login as root and delete .xprofile
rm -f ~/.xprofile