Cleaning Out Cobwebs

I recently purchased an SVA 19" Widescreen TFT-LCD Monitor. Maximum resolution 1440x900, thin panel, internal speakers (but no manual volume control, yech), user's manual in something resembling English, and it was on sale for $99.95 at Staples. Works fine. Monitors are a commodity these days, anyway.

But that's now why I called you here today. The problem was that Hal, here, couldn't display the 1440x900 resolution of the monitor. Even though Hal's Formerly Evil Twin, running on an even bigger monitor down in Raleigh, had no trouble. All Hal could do was 1024x768, which tends to stretch out on a widescreen monitor.

It didn't take long to find the problem. Here's the relevant section of Hal's /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:

Section "Screen"
 Identifier "Default Screen"
 Device  "Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device"
 Monitor  "ENVISION"
 DefaultDepth 16
 SubSection "Display"
  Depth  1
  Modes  "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
 EndSubSection
 SubSection "Display"
  Depth  4
  Modes  "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
 EndSubSection
 SubSection "Display"
  Depth  8
  Modes  "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
 EndSubSection
 SubSection "Display"
  Depth  15
  Modes  "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
 EndSubSection
 SubSection "Display"
  Depth  16
  Modes  "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
 EndSubSection
 SubSection "Display"
  Depth  24
  Modes  "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
 EndSubSection
EndSection

No resolution is above 1024x768. And ENVISION means that this was set up for a monitor I got rid of a year or so ago. In fact, this xorg.conf file might well go back to the days when I was running Fedora. so this might, just might, need a little modification.

To fix this in the olden days, say 2004, you'd track down all of the parameters for the current monitor, edit the file with the appropriate information, and hope all was well. Later there were scripts that did some of that, if the monitor was well known.

Now you just run

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

This generates a default xorg.conf file, with the relevant section

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

xorg itself then configures the monitor, device, etc., if you Ubuntu has all the drivers. This won't work for everything, and if you have a video card with proprietary drivers you're going to have to load them up, but it's a heck of a lot easier than back in the day.