1920x1200 Resolution with Intel 945GM

   2009-02-06      Tech      linux

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 1280x960 to be the highest resolution for my 24" Monitor (even my 8-year-old GeForce 2 MX 400 supports 1920x1200!!).
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 2048x2048 if you get an error like “xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 1600x1600 (desired size 2624x1200)”
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.