Wide Screen LCD screen Resolution

Being the tightwad that I am I have been continuing to use my 17 inch CRT monitor even though I really wanted one of those nice new flat panel LCD's. I just could not bring myself to spend the money on one as long as I had a perfectly good monitor sitting on my desk. Well recently the old CRT began showing signs of nearing the end of it's life, the occasional ripple through the screen, going fuzzy for a second once in awhile. So I decided the time was right for a new monitor, I bought an HP 2009m 20 inch 16:9 wide screen LCD.

The new monitor is very nice, it supports both the old style VGA connector and the newer DVI connector which is preferred if your hardware supports it, mine does. It also has built in speakers which I have not tried because I have a fairly nice set of speakers and I can't imagine that the monitor's speakers would be better or even equal to what I'm already using.

The only down side with the 16:9 wide screen monitor was that the GUI would only offer one screen resolution that would properly fit the screen, 1600x900. Other listed resolutions where not wide, so they would appear stretched to fit the wide screen. At 1600x900 text on the screen was too small for comfortable viewing, my eyes aren't what they used to be. A quick Google search showed that 1366x768 should be the resolution comparable to 1024x768 on the 17 inch screen that I was used to.

The online documentation for this monitor shows that it supports the 1366x768 resolution. So the question is how to get the screen to display at the desired resolution when the settings don't offer that option. The answer is to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. I started poking around in xorg.config trying different options and promptly broke it. And that's why you should backup config files before editing them, which I did by the way. So I restored xorg.conf and did a google.com/linux search for a solution. What would we do without Google?

I found info from a guy trying to go the other direction with his screen resolution. It was suggested too him to use the gtf command to get the needed modeline info to use in xorg.conf.

Given the desired horizontal and vertical resolutions and refresh rate gtf will generate the info for xorg.conf. In my case:

So in /etc/X11/xorg.conf under Section "Monitor" I addded:

Then under Setion "screen" comment out the Option "metamodes" line.

And in SubSection "Display" add:

This worked quite nicely in VectorLinux 6, but not in Fedora 10. The xorg.conf in Fedora seemed to be a bit bloated so after trying a few different things, as root I issued:

Then to generate a new xorg.conf file that was cleaner, clicked the "save to X configuration file" button.

Then added the two lines as above, and commented out the "option metamodes" line. This seemed to work, until I noteced that the desk top effects were not working. I then opened a termenal and issued:

This error sugests that the drivers for the Nvidia video card are not working. So back to google to find a solution to this new problem, which turned out to be simply adding a couple of lines too the "files" section of xorg.conf.

Now all is good. I have my preferred screen resolution on my new wide screen LCD, and Nvidia 3D dvivers are working, and I have alot more room on my desk. I copied the exact same xorg.conf from Fedora 10 too Fedora 12 and it works perfectly with no changes. I have never used Fedora 11 so I don't know if it would work there also, but my guess would be yes. If you want to see my Fedora 10 /etc/X11/xorg.conf there is a copy here.

Moral of the story, Google is your friend.

Hope this has been ether helpful of entertaining too someone.

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