To sum up: 1) x-session: /etc/gdm/custom.conf via "command=/usr/bin/X -dpi XYZ -audit 0" 2) user, most applications: Preferences>Appearance>Fonts>Details...>Resolution 3) user, other applications: ~/.Xresources - "Xft.dpi: XYZ " 4) user, Firefox web-page contents: about:config - ...

One more thing: while Firefox does scale the font in the UI elements accordingly, the web-page contents is not affected by the tweak.
To fix that, layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in about:config needs to be set to a value = dpi /96.

Thanks to your hint I refined my search and found that the recommended way to set the correct DPI is through the GDM configuration-file /etc/gdm/custom.conf Under the " [servers] " section I copied over the default settings from /usr/share/gdm/defaults.conf , and just added " -dpi 100...

gapan wrote:You can also set it in ~/.Xresources for apps that don't behave.

Done that as well - still no go

gapan wrote:In MATE System Menu/Preferences/Appearance/Fonts tab/Details button.

It was the first thing I did, but xdpyinfo still says "96x96" so not all the apps seem to recognize the Fonts/Details setting, so I assume that it needs to be set globally somewhere else...

Setting up SalixOS 14.1 MATE on a PC with a larger screen, I needed to slightly increase the DPI from its default of "96" to have more readable fonts. Now, adding "-dpi 100" to defaultserverargs= in /usr/bin/startx didn't change the DPI to the desired value: > xdpyinfo | grep -B2...

Everything worked after I logged out and in again. I guess the problem was related to the messed-up $PATH during the various experiments. Thanks!

As the laptop seems to be based on the (rather new-ish) Haswell chipset, I'd also advise to use a newer kernel OR a newer Linux Graphics Driver, however I have no experience on how to build it, so somebody more knowledgeable might jump in to help out.

gapan wrote:Does the same thing happen to you in that other PC?

Yes, exactly the same error

Here is the listing of the directory (I am on another PC now, so I re-created it): > ls -la total 4772 drwxr-xr-x 2 jjbj users 4096 Jan 26 13:28 . drwxr-xr-x 3 jjbj users 4096 Jan 26 13:27 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 jjbj users 63 Jan 26 13:28 git-1.9.0-build.log -rw-r----- 1 jjbj users 4839724 Jan 26 13:27 git...