I recently bought a nice new 37" Samsung LE37S86BDX LCD TV from Argos. It's very nice, but I've had a few problems with it...
First off, when watching my Sky+ box via SCART, the telly would randomly and intermittently switch itself to standby, then back on, then back to standby, then back on again. Which was nice. A call to the nice (really) people at Argos got me put through to the equally nice people at Samsung, who arranged to a local TV repair firm to come "fix" it. The guy came, pressed a mysterious sequence of buttons on the remote, and a secret menu popped up on screen. From there he switched off "Watch Dog" mode. The engineer didn't know what it was, but knew it would solve the problem. Huh.
Well, since then I've done a bit of "research" (google search) and came up with this link at digitalspy, where someone had the same problem, but Samsung told him how to sort it out over the phone. I wish they'd told me this over the phone, it would have saved me a morning sitting of around waiting for the TV guy to turn up. Anyway, here's what he did:
With the TV on standby:
Press INFO, MENU, MUTE, POWER and the TV should spring to life with a new menu on screen (the "service menu"). Scroll down to option 9 on the first screen, press left arrow to get to a sub-menu where you will see "Watch dog" a little way down the screen. Scroll down to it, press left arrow to change it to "off". That's it apparently. Switch off the TV and switch it on again.
I'm just waiting to see if that has done the trick.
Secondly I used the VGA port on the back of the telly to connect my little Ubuntu box to the telly. With the video drivers that Ubuntu uses as default (vesa?) Ubuntu worked a treat. It worked out the correct resolution (1360x768) and all was well. Then I wanted to enable desktop effects. Ubuntu told me I should install the nVidia closed source drivers to allow wizzy effects, and that it could do so automagically from one of it's apt repositories. Great, I thought, do it.
It did it, rebooted and ... 800x600. Pants.
Skip forward several hours of fighting with the screen settings, the resolution settings to me actually working out the modeline entry for the xorg.conf file:
here it is:
modeline "1360x768@60" 85.5 1360 1440 1552 1792 768 771 777 795 +hsync +vsync
That was hard work. Also, this didn't solve the problem completely, because although the login-screen was now being displayed in glorious 1360x768, the desktop for my default user was not. It turns out editing this file : $HOME/.gconf/desktop/gnome/screen/htpc/0/%gconf.xml and changing 1024x768 to 1360x768, and logging out and in again fixed the issue.
Blimey. What a kerfuffle. And they say Linux is ready for the desktop!
Anyway, next on the list: building XBMC for Linux on it!
