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X11 low-resolution scrollable desktop

This setup is useful for running X11 on a Mac, and for *older* GNU/Linux-based X servers. Many newer Linux boxes can’t do this anymore and will need a high-DPI setup instead (unless you want to use VNC-based magnification).

To set up the low resolution and the scrolling on a Mac, see Mac magnification setup
To set it up on older Linux boxes, see Magnification in X11

The customisation below is for fonts and colours in the low-resolution desktop.

Configuration files

These are usually files and directories in your home directory whose names start with a dot (.). You have to use ls -a to list them. I do not recommend replacing your existing files with these without first checking that your existing files do not contain anything important. Look at the files and see if you want to merge anything.

.Xresources - used for setting fonts and colours (etc) in various X applications; a good starting point. See the comments at the beginning of the file about setup.

.Xresources

.gtkrc - needed in addition to the above for some applications. You should save this file as both .gtkrc and .gtkrc-2.0 (or just save it as .gtkrc and do ln -s .gtkrc .gtkrc-2.0).

.gtkrc

Note: Some badly-behaved programs will need this .gtkrc to be temporarily renamed before they are started.

.lyx/lyxrc and .lyx/preferences - used to configure LyX (a LaTeX front-end). Note: If using a version of LyX prior to 1.5.3, use the XForms version rather than the Qt version, due to LyX bug 4293.
XEmacs configuration details are on a separate page

Window managers: flwm’s colours can be configured at the command line from within .xsession, e.g. flwm -fg white -bg darkblue; if you have an old version that doesn’t obey the -fg flag, you may be able to upgrade, or apply the patch I submitted to Debian bug #267983. On some systems you may have to fall back to TWM in which case you could try this .twmrc.

.twmrc

Other

If your system causes modern applications to render their fonts poorly at low resolution, you might also want to check my FreeType at low resolution page.

Some distributions also have a package big-cursor which provides large fonts for the mouse cursor (sometimes you can just install it, but very old versions might need a little setting up).

Don’t forget to also adjust the monitor’s ‘brightness’ and ‘contrast’ settings to comfortable levels. (I usually find a high ‘contrast’ and a low ‘brightness’ is better.)

If an application’s bright background is hurting your eyes, and you cannot get it to change colours using the above configuration or any other method, then as a last resort you can try my VNC colour-inverting hack.

Legal

All material © Silas S. Brown unless otherwise stated. Debian is a trademark owned by Software in the Public Interest, Inc. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Inc. TeX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society. VNC is a registered trademark of RealVNC Limited. Any other trademarks I mentioned without realising are trademarks of their respective holders.