[Xbox-linux-user] HDTV, modelines and overscan - and netbooting, too

[Mike B. <mi...@bl...>]

  Hi, all! I'm a bit of a latecomer to the Xbox Linux scene, but I have 
Xebian 1.1.4 running on my Xbox like a charm. I originally intended for 
it to be a "diskless" install (netboot with Cromwell, then power down 
the drive to cut down on heat/noise) and I got that working, but I ended 
up having to install a new hard drive anyway, so I figured I might as 
well do a local installation. That turned out to be a whole lot less 
hassle, and everything worked great. I hope to eventually make this Xbox 
into a MythTV front end, which I know has been done before.

  The problem I'm up against now, however, is my new HDTV. I found 
documentation on getting higher resolutions in X, both on the Xbox Linux 
wiki and the MythTV wiki as well. I now have resolutions up to 1080p 
available (the highest my TV will do), but I also have serious overscan 
problems - a good chunk of the left and right sides of the desktop are 
off the edges. I know what I need to do is tweak the modelines, but I'm 
not exactly sure what I should tweak. I did look at the relevant man 
page and I have an idea what the various numbers in a modeline mean, but 
I'm not really sure what exactly I should do to make the lines 
"narrower." I'm not sure if I need to increase the dot clock frequency, 
make the total line length shorter (but leave the sync pulses alone), 
tweak the sync too, or what. If anyone can point me in the right 
direction, I'd appreciate it.

  If anyone's interested in how I got netbooting with Cromwell/etherboot 
working, I'd be happy to discuss that, too. I never quite finished the 
custom initrd I was building, but I think I at least figured out what I 
needed to do to make it work without hard-coding the IP address, which 
was my hack to make it work. I ended up needing to use the E: partition 
in the end anyway, for /tmp (otherwise dpkg threw fits when trying to 
delete files over NFS) and a swap file, which kind of negated my "power 
down the local hard drive" idea anyway.