So yeah, I decided to get a new monitor for myself. I splurged and got a 19″ LG Flatron 1910BK. I have to say I absolutely love having a huge fucking flat panel monitor sitting on my desk. It gives me so much screen space it’s not even funny. Oddly, it runs @ 1280×1024 just like all the 17″ panels do. I kinda wish it did a somewhat higher resolution, but it sees to me that all 19’s are 1280×1024. Anyway, it’s great because I can literally see a ton more text and windows on screen but it’s not so small that it’s impossible to read. LG claims a 176 degree viewing angle and I’d actually believe it. I can stand at almost any angle and not have any trouble reading what’s on-screen. Brightness on this thing is outrageous and I’ve actually had to turn the brightness down a LOT from the factory default of 100. I have it set @ about 40 and it’s fine for me. Color reproduction appears to be perfectly fine. I can’t really tell any diference between it and my CRT. If anything, the colors seem a bit more vivid than on my CRT. A big complaint a lot of people seem to have with LCD’s is the fact that black isn’t really black. It’s more of a dark grey. Well, I’ll admit that the black is ever so slightly lighter than the black on my CRT, but not by much… and it’s most certainly tolerable. It has a 2-port USB hub in the side of it, which is kinda cool but I don’t really use it seeing as how I have 6 ports on my computer as it is and the monitor’s USB hub takes one of those anyway. I have it hooked up via DVI since my video card supports it and I figure if I’m going to spend $400 on an LCD, I’m going to use DVI by god! I’m still running my 17″ CRT as my 2nd monitor because, well, I can! No reason not to, even though the stupid thing takes up a ridiculous amount of space on my desk. I haven’t watched any movies or played any games, so I have no idea if ghosting is a problem. I’ll have to check on that in the next day or so. I doubt it’ll ghost too badly due to the nature of the type of panel that it is, but we’ll see how my theory holds.
Setting up the dual monitors in Linux was more trouble than it should have been. I had to change the primary display to the LCD then kill & restart X. Then I had to enable dual head and set the 2nd monitor as my CRT.. then set the resolution on the CRT. After that, the 2nd monitor was placed by default to the RIGHT of my primary so I had move my mouse off the screen to the right to get to my 2nd monitor even though it was physically to the left of my main one. At this point, there’s no EASYway of doing this, so one must edit xorg.conf by hand and change the relationship of the two (just change right to left, no biggie) then kill and restart X again and login. Poof! All working properly! I booted back into windows to set it up and it took all of 5 seconds. Windows detected everything and automatically enabled both monitors. Then I just went in and dragged them to their correct positions and I was done. No rebooting, no logging off and back on, nothing. So yeah, windows is easier in that respect. Plus in windows I can drag apps from one to the other easily. In order to do it in Linux, it spans the desktops and my wallpaper sits in the middle spanned across both. UGH!
I’m still booted into Linux though. There’s nothing I have in Windows that I can’t find an alternative for in Linux. Everything works fine in Linux so far. Plus it’s a learning experience. I like the idea of knowing the ins and outs of more than just Windows. Oh well.. that’s it for now.. I gotta get SOME sleep.