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I had some trouble to get the maximum resolution for my monitor, using the VGA output of my Thinkpad. I’m running Ubuntu Hardy which uses the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver by default. This can be combined with xrandr to manage all your monitor/resolution settings without restarting all the time.

First of all I had a look at the possible resolutions:

asdf@fatalii ~ $ sudo xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1200, maximum 2048 x 2048
VGA connected 1920x1200+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 518mm x 324mm
1280x960 59.9
800x600 56.2
640x480 60.0
LVDS connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
1024x768 60.0 + 50.0
800x600 60.3
640x480 60.0 59.9


I couldn’t believe 1280×960 to be the highest resolution for my 24″ Monitor (even my 8-year-old GeForce 2 MX 400 supports 1920×1200!!).
After having a look at the Xorg.log I found a Modeline for my desired quantity of pixels. The trick is: just add the modeline to xrandr’s “database”.
Here are the three relevant lines to fix the issue


xrandr --newmode "1920x1200" 154.00 1920 1968 2000 2080 1200 1203 1209 1235 +hsync -vsync
xrandr --addmode VGA 1920x1200
xrandr --output VGA --mode 1920x1200


Important: Set the Virtual Resolution in your xorg.conf to the maximum of 2048×2048 if you get an error like “xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 1600×1600 (desired size 2624×1200)”
Here is an excerpt of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Screen"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768"
Virtual 2048 2048
EndSubSection
EndSection


Finally you could add the relevant mode changing lines to /etc/rc.local or something like this to adjust resolution automatically.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 15:54 and is filed under GNU/Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. GNU/Linux | tags: GNU/Linux, graphics, hint, howto, intel, resolution, X