Linux Mint Forums

Hi

It would be helpful if there was a GUI app that could be used to add new screen resolutions to linuxmint. I see there are many questions about how to get Mint to work with resolutions supported by the graphics card and monitor but not shown in the settings under Monitors. It would be helpful if the app allowed you to try different screen resolutions and then allowed you to save them to the xorg.conf file so that would be available in the future under display settings.

Simon

AFAIK generally problems with too limited screen resolutions are caused by your graphics card driver. Especially on AMD and Nvidia, where I think still you need the proprietary (closed source) driver for unlocking all features of your graphics card. By default the open source graphics card driver is loaded on Linux Mint, which way not do all you want depending on your specific model graphics card. These steps may be needed: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=122257

By default, all working resolutions/syncs/color-depths combinations that your monitor is really able to support are detected on X start and then made available in the screen res list.

The actual capabilities of the monitor are more than often the limiting factor on modern GPU outputs. For example, almost any recent desktop GPU is able to display effortless a 2560x1536 full-color resolution on one screen. So, if any resolution is not available under X, maybe this is a driver problem (or bad driver choice), but IMO this is more probably a monitor capabilites concern than a driver concern.

Edit: however, such a tool would be useful for manual debugging, particularly when your GPU/driver enforces monitor "out-of-sync" settings on the output.

eanfrid wrote:By default, all working resolutions/syncs/color-depths combinations that your monitor is really able to support are detected on X start and then made available in the screen res list.

The actual capabilities of the monitor are more than often the limiting factor on modern GPU outputs. For example, almost any recent desktop GPU is able to display effortless a 2560x1536 full-color resolution on one screen. So, if any resolution is not available under X, maybe this is a driver problem (or bad driver choice), but IMO this is more probably a monitor capabilites concern than a driver concern.

Edit: however, such a tool would be useful for manual debugging, particularly when your GPU/driver enforces monitor "out-of-sync" settings on the output.

Yes I would find it particularly useful for handling such situations because I have that situation now because I had to change the monitor after installation and now LinuxMint does not give me the option to use the higher resolution available on the new monitor which is supported by the graphics card.

You can try xrandr, there is also a gui xrandr, it is shown in the link below..
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xrandr

You can also play with modes, modelines for a monitor
--but you have to be careful, you could fry your monitor, making it useless

WOW I always use xrandr on the CLI and did not even believe there already could exist a few GUI frontends for it Thanks DrHu.