Peter Boy wrote: [Apologies for the lengthy reply, but I thought it was worth explaining this in a bit of detail, so it's archived somewhere for future reference.]
There is a bugzilla entry (115662) regarding the the video resolution used by anaconda, if the properties of the monitor are unknown (proposition: use 640*400 instead of 800*600 as currently)
640x480 is incredibly small, and does not leave much room to fit everything on the screen that is needed, so that is more or less out of the question as far as I understand. Even 800x600 is pretty short on real estate.
On the other hand: anaconda can detect the proper resolution via DPMS and does so correctly.
DPMS is power saving. You mean "DDC probing". DDC probing is performed by the "ddcprobe" utility, which uses LRMI which is x86 specific. As such, monitor autodetection is only performed on x86, and not on any other architecture. Additionally, DDC probing via ddcprobe only works if the video BIOS implements it correctly and handles all of the connected displays in a sane fashion, which in practice is rarely true. KVM switches also generally block the DDC signal to/from the monitor, which means most KVM switch users cause all software to lose the ability to autodetect attached displays. Many LCD panels, and DFP displays do not support DDC, and while most if not all currently selling models do, there are hundreds of thousands of ones already sold that do not. So we can not rely on the panel always being able to be detected. There are various other reasons why DDC probing simply does not work reliably, but I think the above list is adequate enough to point out that it simply does not work very often. The long term solution to this problem ultimately, requires some rather long overdue non-trivial changes to the X server. Since most of the video drivers implement DDC probing directly by talking to the chip directly through i2c, the video drivers have access to the most correct and accurate information, and tend to be much more reliable in practice. Additionally, since the video drivers do this directly, they are not limited to DDC probing only on x86, and thus can probe on any architecture. Some of the drivers do not have native DDC probing, and use the VBE, however since the X server includes a complete x86 emulator, the BIOS can be executed on non-x86 architectures to provide DDC probing as well. Unfortunately, none of that functionality is easily exported outside of the running X server currently. Once X.Org gets enhanced to standardize the internal interfaces with which drivers do this probing and various other things, and export the information to applications in some manner, we will theoretically be able to replace the very limited x86-only ddc-probe utility with a more generic solution that works on all architectures, and is much more accurate at detecting attached displays and their various characteristics. While there are currently no X developers who are planning on working on this anytime soon to the best of my knowledge, if there are any highly motivated developers out there, who are interested in volunteering to make this happen, wether or not you have prior X server development experience, please feel free to drop by xorg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and discuss your interest. The #freedesktop channel on freenode may also be helpful as many X devs hang out there. TTYL