I’m currently building a new computer as a server that will eventually live out in my garage hooked up to a small 1024×768 LCD monitor, but most of the time it will be accessed by VNC, so I just bought the cheapest PCIe video card that I could find for it, an nVidia GeForce FX5500. However, while I am building it, I have it hooked up to a 24″ Acer LCD monitor which is running at 1920×1200.
The computer is running Ubunto 9.04 (Jaunty) Alpha 6, and the restricted nVidia drivers (v173), but the when I run nvidia-settings, the highest resolution that it offered me was 1920×1080, and that was interlaced, which looked terrible! What’s worse, all of the 16:9 ratio’s looked really bad, and I was forced to use one of the lower 4:3 ratios to get it to display properly
Although I am running Jaunty, the fix that I found is fairly generic, and so should work on just about any Linux distro
I checked out the logfile (/var/log/xorg.0.log) to see what it was saying, and it was reporting that the maximum pixel clock for my monitor was 135MHz, which I found really strange because when I hook up my other computer to the same monitor, it reports the maximum pixel clock as 330MHz. Since the nvidia settings thought the pixel clock was limited to 135MHz, it was limiting my resolution options to those that had a lower pixel clock than that. A quick look at google provided some options to at to the xorg.conf file in /etc/X11:
First, I added the line in red to the Monitor section:
Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Monitor0″
VendorName “Unknown”
ModelName “Acer AL2416W”
HorizSync 24.0 – 80.0
VertRefresh 49.0 – 75.0
Option “ModeValidation” “NoMaxPClkCheck;NoEdidMaxPClkCheck”
EndSection
This just tells the video card to ignore the reported Pixel Clock settings.
Secondly, I added the lines in Red to my Screen section
Section “Screen”
Identifier “Screen0″
Device “Device0″
Monitor “Monitor0″
DefaultDepth 24
Option “TwinView” “0″
Option “metamodes” “CRT-0: 1920×1200 +0+0″
SubSection “Display”
Depth 24
Modes “1920×1200″ “1600×1200″ “1280×1024″ “1024×768″ “800×600″ “640×480″
EndSubSection
EndSection
These lines tell the video card to use 1920×1200 as the default resolution
Then I just logged out, and logged in again and viola! perfect stable 1920×1200! I’ll probably have to fix this again when I hook up the small monitor, but that’s easy!