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Linux: Fluxbox on Nvidia driver: Fonts are huge

bgstack15

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I installed Devuan GNU+Linux on a desktop computer with a Nvidia graphics card. Once I used the nvidia-driver dpkg and rebooted, everything worked correctly. Fluxbox had a problem where its size 8 fonts were gigantic! Investigating revealed that the Nvidia settings utility shows a DPI of 304x305. An Internet search for nvidia fluxbox large font showed a very useful solution from the FreeBSD forum

Inside the generated xorg.conf (which I placed in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/hostname.conf), add to the "Monitor" section:

Option         "UseEditDpi" "false"
Option         "DPI" "96 x 96"

Also, I learned that lspci -v will show you what kernel module is in use for a given PCI device. Here is my graphics card with the proprietary Nvidia driver.

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 30, IOMMU group 1 Memory at f6000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M] Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M] Memory at f0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M] I/O ports at e000 [size=128] Expansion ROM at 000c0000 [virtual] [disabled] [size=128K] Capabilities: Kernel driver in use: nvidia Kernel modules: nvidia

References

Internet searches

  1. nvidia fluxbox large font

Weblinks

  1. https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/fluxbox-fonts-are-huge.22849/
update 2024-04-13

While you might be tempted to place a file, /etc/X11/Xresources/dpi with contents:

! bgstack15 2023-07-16-1 17:29
Xft.dpi: 96

Which tends to help most of the time, it doesn't fix the "hardware" dpi that this post helps with. See also https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/gsq0ix/nvidia_drivers_ruins_my_resolution_and_dpi/ which indicates to place this in a file, e.g., /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/hostname.conf:

Section "OutputClass"
    Identifier "nvidia dpi settings"
    MatchDriver "nvidia-drm"
    Option "UseEdidDpi" "False"
    Option "DPI" "96 x 96"
EndSection

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