Friday, August 22, 2008

Fixing the small screen on my laptop


My beloved Gateway MT6730 had one fatal flaw when converting to Ubuntu: The screen resolution.
It appears that the xrandr logic insisted I had a TV connected to my laptop and therefore would overlap two screens: one at 1024x768 which everything resized to, and one at my laptop's preferred resolution: 1280x800. It looks like this image. I'm certain if you're here, you know EXACTLY what this is.

From a command line, I found out I could do this: xrandr --output TV --off which kind of worked, except didn't survive reboots.

Here's the answer:
Edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add these lines:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "TV"
Option "Ignore" "true"
EndSection

Exit and do a ctrl-alt-backspace to reload X, and you, like me, don't have to worry about this any more.

Also, the "Unknown" display disappeared from the gnome-display-properties, as well as it fixed the same issue with the logon screen.

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