), but recently obtained an Acer Aspire Revo, which as you probably know, only has a HDMI video output. Anyway, once I installed the NVIDIA drivers I ran into the dreaded overscan problem - in Mint I can't even see the bottom menu bar!This particular problem has caused weeping and gnashing of teeth among people who have far more experience with Linux than I. Just to illustrate the point, see this thread:
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?s= ... t=overscan
What's stunning is how many people are having problems with it, and how many are debating over the correct way to fix the problem.
If you install XBMC Live (or just the XBMC software), or the Boxee software, both have overscan correction built in. In XBMC you can reduce the size of the screen area in increments of 2% (I wish it was 1% or even finer granularity, but at least the adjustment is there). In Boxee you can adjust the correct screen size to the exact pixel (though the way to do that isn't fully intuitive - you have to use the arrow keys to bump the display limits).
In Windows 7, the NVIDIA drivers have overscan correction built in (that is, it can be adjusted from the control panel, as I understand it). For some reason this has been omitted from the Linux version of the drivers.
What I'd like to see is a setting in Mint, similar to the overscan correction in XBMC, that reduces the size of the desktop (and the screen area that programs are allowed to use) to fit the actual screen. If XBMC and Boxee can do it, why can't it be built into the operating system?
Another thing that would be very helpful is some kind of configuration utility that would assist people with setting this up for their displays. Some people may enjoy messing with .conf files and options, but for relatively inexperienced folks like me, it's so much gobbledygook. The whole point of using a modern distro like Mint or Ubuntu is that you shouldn't have to mess with config files if you don't understand them, or just don't want to.
But if we absolutely MUST manually tweak a particular file, it would be great if someone would set up a database of known digital TV models, so at least we won't all have to bang our heads against a wall. If they can have databases for printers and scanners and such, why not digital TV's (and other oddball displays)? Because, it's becoming very apparent that people are using Linux on small PC's with the Ion processor, and connecting those to their digital TV's, and it would be nice if we could find what others have done to resolve the problems on the same or similar models.
The other problem I note is that some of the people who actually seem to understand this stuff are apparently laboring under the impression that the sort of user that would install Linux on a home theater PC is also the sort of user that actually wants to know something about the "guts" of Linux. I suspect that's very seldom the case. Back before Ubuntu and Mint came along, I wouldn't have considered touching Linux with the proverbial ten-foot pole. It's only because those distributions have GUI configuration utilities that I'd now use them. So it's rather disappointing that the Windows folks can correct this issue from the GUI (of course, they can do nearly everything from the GUI) but such is not the case in Mint and Unbuntu. It's not beneath me to follow a "clear and simple" set of instructions for making something work (even if I do have to go into a .conf file) but it seems there is nothing clear or simple about this, and people can't even agree on the "correct" way to do it. If there is any way at all to automate the process, or at least make it more understandable, it would be very much appreciated!