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How to Adding a widescreen monitor in Linux

Recently I purchased a 23″ wide screen monitor for my primary desktop PC. I had a feeling there would be a bit of an issue when I plugged it into my Elive Compiz installation that isn’t as user-friendly as, say, a Ubuntu installation. When I did plug it in it wasn’t horrible. The biggest problem I had was the new aspect ratio of the monitor (16:9) was causing everything on the screen to seem stretched with the previous resolution (1280×1024).

The monitor itself was reporting that the ideal resolution was 1920×1080, so I figured it was just a matter of adding the correct mode to the “Screen” section of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. It wasn’t that easy.

The first attempt

Normally, when I needed to change a resolution, or just hard-code a resolution, I would add a sub section in the xorg.conf file like:

SubSection “Display”
Modes “1920×1080″ “1440×900″ “1600×1200″ “1440×1440″ “1280×1024″ “1280×960″ “1280×800″ “1152×864″ “1024×768″ “832×624″ “800×600″ “720×400″ “640×480″
EndSubSection

Normally this would work, picking up the 1920×1080 mode first. In this instance, however, this did not work. I will tell you that I am working with an NVidia Geforce 8800 chipset, so support in Linux is quite good. I know this isn’t an issue with the video card. But no matter what resolution I used I was having no luck fighting the aspect ratio. The screen was either stretched too far horizontally, cropped at the bottom, or cropped all around.

I remembered there was an application that would gather information about my monitor and report it back. Maybe that was the key. The application is ddcprobe will give you the following information:

* Monitor name
* Monitor VertRefresh values and HorizSync rates range
* dpms

To install this application issue the command:

sudo apt-get install xresprobe

and you are ready to check. To do this issue the command

ddcprobe

which will return something like this:

vbe: VESA 3.0 detected.
oem: NVIDIA
vendor: Build 070809.2
product: MCP67 – mcp68-02 Chip Rev
memory: 65536kb
mode: 640x400x256
mode: 640x480x256
mode: 800x600x16
mode: 800x600x256
mode: 1024x768x16
mode: 1024x768x256
mode: 1280x1024x16
mode: 1280x1024x256
mode: 320x200x64k
mode: 320x200x16m
mode: 640x480x64k
mode: 640x480x16m
mode: 800x600x64k
mode: 800x600x16m
mode: 1024x768x64k
mode: 1024x768x16m
mode: 1280x1024x64k
mode: 1280x1024x16m
edid:
edidfail

Notice the edidfail at the end. What happens is sometimes hardware will not respond properly when the EDID is queried. If this happens try to probe a few more times, you should get more information. In my case, the Samsung 2333sw would never report the full information.

Back to square one.

NVidia

Remember I mentioned I was using an NVidia GeForce chipset? That’s a good thing because there is a handy application called nvidia-settings that I had used with much success before. The only reason I hadn’t automatically tried this was because I have had issues with the Elive Compiz distribution and X when trying to use tools not standard to the distribution. And besides the Elive resolution tool wasn’t picking up the new monitor so there was no hope there.

Installing the new tool was as simple as issuing:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings

Running the tool was equally as easy by issuing the command:

sudo nvidia-settings
Adding a widescreen monitor in Linux

Figure 1

When this application starts you will see a number of sections in the left pane (see Figure 1) that you can click on. Click on the X Server Display Configuration and you will then see a button for Detect Displays. Click on that and the new resolution should appear. The next step is to click the Save to X Configuration File which will write your changes.Finally click the Quit button to finish up.

In order to actually have the changes take effect you have to log out of X and log back in. Once you do you should see your new wide screen monitor in action.

What did it write?

The results of the nvidia-settings change to the xorg.conf file surprised me. It completely rewrote the “Screen” section of the Xorg configuration file. Here is the “Screen” section:

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen0″
Device “Videocard0″
Monitor “Monitor0″
DefaultDepth 24
Option “TwinView” “0″
Option “TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder” “CRT-0″
Option “metamodes” “1920×1080 +0+0; 1440×900 +0+0; 1280×1024 +0+0; 1280×960 +0+0; 1280×800 +0+0; 1024×768 +0+0; 800×600 +0+0; 640×480 +0+0″
SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

The TwinView option is usually used for dual head displays. In order for Xorg to get the 16:9 aspect ration it must use it and splice the two images together.

Final thoughts

Linux has come such a long way. But when you are attempting to configure a distribution that isn’t especially made to be Noobie-friendly don’t expect for tasks like attaching a widescreen monitor to be an out of the box experience. The good news is that there are plenty of tools to help you out of little situations such as this.

In the end the new monitor works and is as beautiful a display as I have seen.

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