Well I Googled around to try and find an easy way to force a widescreen resolution on Ubuntu 7.04, but with no luck. I have a Samsung SyncMaster 931 BW and a nVIDIA 7600 GS (drivers are running fine). I'm sure people here know Linux a lot better than me, and hopefully will be able to help me. Thanks for your time.

There are two ways to go about it: the simple way, and the manual way. Depending on whether something has been developed for your graphics card, you may be able to download a small patch that forces it to run a widescreen resolution. I did that on my laptop, which uses an integrated Intel graphics chip. The patch was called 915resolution, but you'd have to find something similar that works with your graphics card.

Alternatively you can manually edit what resolutions are available in the Xorg.conf file. Editing this file comes with the standard warning: muck it up and you could be in real problems. So, make sure you take a backup and you know where it is, so you can copy it back if need be. Open up the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and find the section marked Screen or Display (it should be pretty easy to work out which bit it is). Modify it so you add this line:



...in the subsection called Display.

For example, to get 1280x800 working on my laptop, I had to change xorg.conf to have the following section:


Remember, if you're not confident doing it yourself, search around for the name of your screen and graphics card and see if anyone can offer more precise help, although this should work. Just remember to take a backup

The way i do it, which has always done the job for me, is by going to System Settings > Monitor & Display. Enter Administrator mode, then click on the Hardware tab. Hit Configure for the Monitor one (should be the second Configure button), then pick the resolution you want. Apply the settings, and restart the X-server (you may have to go back in and set the resolution up on the first tab: Size, Orientation & Positioning). Doing it this way, i've managed to get the resolutions i wanted and that my monitor supports with ease, i've also managed to get really high resolutions to become available, even though the monitor was not made for those higher resolutions. Btw, always back up your xorg.conf file (Kubuntu may do that for you, though). That way, if anything goes wrong, you can pop in the Kubuntu LiveCD, mount your HDD, change to the back up, then restart, and everything will be back to before you started changing settings.

I actually have a problem with changing the resolution on my widescreen in ubuntu. I have a 23" flat panel apple cinema display display and it is supposed to be able to do 1920x1200, and when running mac osx it runs fine so there's nothing wrong with the screen, but in Ubuntu, 1920x1200 is one of the options under the resolution menu, but when changing it the screen looks like i just changed the frame rate to something it doesn't like. I don't know I'm not really into displays and stuff so I dont know how to describe it other than saying it looks like when you degauss a crt monitor and i have to restart to fix it...

This post has been edited by alex7h3pr0gr4m3r: Sep 19 2007, 07:20 PM

Thanks for the info guys, I solved the problem by opening up the terminal and typing in "nvidia-settings". Then on the X Server Display Configuration I choose a 1440x900 resolution. I had to set the refresh rate to auto, or else the screen looked oversized and unclear. My monitor is detected as a CRT, but as long as I got my resolution working, then I'm not worried. Perhaps this is what truefusion meant, but I wasn't sure about how to get to such settings in his way.