Yesterday, I installed a new NVIDIA RTX A2000 graphic card onto my personal PC. It replaces my old Geforce GT210 card which has been used for over 11 years. The procedures for compiling the official NVIDIA driver and post-tuning the display effect on my high DPI monitor are summarized below.

  • Download the driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-515.65.01.run from NVIDIA’s official website.

  • Install prerequisites for compiling the driver.

    apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential libglvnd-dev pkg-config

  • Disable the default nouveau driver.

    echo blacklist nouveau > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf

  • Compile and install the driver, during which DKMS should be enabled.

    bash NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-515.65.01.run

It is lucky that the installation was quick and successful, while I have never been successful with my old card following the same procedure.

Next, I adjusted the font size for displaying on my high DPI monitor, since everything looked extremely small after the new card started running.

  • KDE system font size configuration
  • Configure GTK3 font size in “Application Style”
  • Eclipse
    • Enlarge all font size in the preferences

    • Enlarge icon size by adding the following in the configuration file eclipse.ini:

      -Dswt.enable.autoScale=true
-Dswt.autoScale=200
-Dswt.autoScale.method=nearest

  • Firefox: in about:config, set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 2.

  • Zotero: in about:config, set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.2.

  • Paraview

    export QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1
paraview &

    [2023-09-01 Fri] This variable should be set to 0 when using other programs, such as emacs and octave.

  • Anki: Anki reference and Qt reference

    alias anki="ANKI_NOHIGHDPI=1 ANKI_WEBSCALE=1.5 anki"

  • Applications based on Java, such as PlantUML, yEd: set the environment variable GDK_SCALE to a value larger than 1. For example, in ~/.bashrc:

    alias plantuml="GDK_SCALE=2 java -jar /usr/share/plantuml/plantuml.jar -gui -tsvg"
  • Netease music: add the command line option --force-device-scale-factor=1.5.

Finally, I enabled vdpau for playing video in VLC. This can be configured by setting VLC’s video output device to VDPAU output.

See here for more information about HiDPI configuration on Linux.