[ale] HiDPI, Primusrun, Nvidia, Intel HD graphics and X11 scaling

[Dow Hurst]

Hi everyone!
It has been a while since I've posted, but I've been reading the list every
so often.  I've run into a challenge dealing with a high res (3840x2160)
smaller laptop screen (16:9 format at 15.6" diagonal).  By using LinuxMint
17.2 with the Cinnamon desktop I can access HiDPI scaling features and
large font sizes that integrate across the desktop and compatible apps.
However, for the few apps that I use that don't pick up that info for fonts
and icons, I'd like to figure out how to scale the separate X server
windows started by primusrun/bumblebee, either by setting a dpi or some
other method.  Adding an Option "DPI"  "192 x 192" line to the
/etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia configuration file doesn't change the
started applications scale at all.  I've just acquired a Eurocom M5 Pro and
just started learning about bumblebee, optimus hardware, and so on.  All
the apps I care about that need acceleration from the nvidia gtx980m card
work just fine with primusrun, except some have unacceptable super tiny
font and icon sizes, and there is no way to change those in the program.
Visual Molecular Dynamics, or VMD, is one example. The head developer has
suggested an interim solution of scaling the application by setting the X
dpi to something much higher than 96x96. He will be working on HiDPI
support, but it may be some time before he can get that built into the
application.  Another app that I'd like to scale, when using the Intel
HD5600 graphics or the nvidia graphics, is Grace, or xmgrace, which is
graphing/plotting application.  Does anyone know how to scale individual
apps at startup without rescaling the whole desktop?

How about setting the virtual terminal font sizes at boot so the fonts in
the terminal located on Cntrl-Alt-F1-F6 are not microscopic? Is there a way
to do that using a truetype font that can scale larger than the bitmap
terminal fonts?

It is amazing what can be done on this laptop. I had 70K atoms displayed in
VdW display style, plus protein backbone ribbons shown, ambient occlusion
turned on, anti-aliasing on, all in Schrodinger's Maestro interface with no
lag at an application window size of 2560 W x 2943 H, running through
primusrun. The details on the structure I used: you would need to download
from the online protein data bank, the crystal structure name 1MT5, and
then a viewing application like pymol, vmd, rasmol, or some protein viewing
app like those installed that you would read the pdb file into so you could
see the structure.

Sincerely,
Dow
⚛Dow Hurst, Research Scientist
       340 Sullivan Science Bldg.
       Dept. of Chem. and Biochem.
       University of North Carolina at Greensboro
       PO Box 26170 Greensboro, NC 27402-6170
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20151013/e0c71fc5/attachment.html>