Friday, September 28, 2012

How to permanently change screen resolution in Ubuntu

Today I tried Kubuntu & Ubuntu 12.10 beta2 in my Virtual Box. Then I went o the friend who has a Mac and I asked him to run Ubuntu on his Mac. Unfortunately he had'nt VirtualBox, but Parallels. When Ubuntu boots it shows that the wrong screen resolution (1920x1080) has been detected,
although the Mac is only 1280x800 (poor one :)

We tried several times to adjust the resolution when an idea came to me. It is too simple to adjust the resolution inside the Ubuntu. Just open terminal and type the next commands:

sudo -i
cd /etc/X11
touch xorg.conf
nano xorg.conf

then in the simple nano editor, write (or just paste) this:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
        SubSection "Display"
          Modes "1280x800"
        EndSubSection
EndSection






then save the file using Ctrl+O, then quit Ctrl+x;
Voila - logout and login again and resolution is fixed forever;

Thanks for the great wiki here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution

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13 comments:

Hi, I'm new in ubuntu, and recently installed 12.10.
When I enter in Displays window, I got only two options resolution: 1024x768 and 800x600, and rotation: Normal.
But my notebook is 1280x800, any idea? please help..

Change the H and Vsync in the xorg.conf file to match your monitors

I pasted this in but nothing happened, im still stuck in 1024x768, any ideas?

im stuck too. same issue on mac mini 2012 using parallels on osx

I also have the same problem using 2012 Mac mini and parallels 8 with ubuntu 12.04. Resolution wont go higher than 1280 x 800 and i want 1920 x 1080 to match my display. What should i do?

I have this same problem. I cannot change my resolution to 1920 x 1080 as it is not displayed as an option within ubuntu 12.04 via parallels 8 on 2012 Mac mini. How can i fix this?

yeah...ubuntu is shit :P
Sorry, but an OS in 2013 should not have issues like this.

I agree that an OS in this day and age shouldn't have these issues, I've been fighting with Ubuntu literally for hours trying to get my 1920x1080 display working. I have read over a dozen webpages about how to supposedly do this. Ubuntu is apparently intended only for Computer Scientists.

Anything worth doing is tough...I make nearly $200k/year sitting on my ass working Ubuntu...the OS doesn't suck--your comprehension skills do. The guy above *gave you the answer.*

Go back to MacOS and leave the real operating systems to the people who are willing to take the time to learn them.

As an IT professional it strikes me that Canonical should at least attempt to make Ubuntu auto detect user's monitors in much the same way that MS Windows does. Setting up a monitor even in Ubuntu 13.10 is rather like the bad old days of Windows 3.1.

Brilliantly simple. Thank you Cvetoslav.

Actually much of the time ubuntu does auto-detect monitors. With 10.04, after years of no problems, it decided it didn't know about the monitor. Worked on it all day. I tried creating the xorg file various ways but that didn't help. I attached the monitor to another box with 14.04 - perfect. I booted the bad box with 14.04 live cd - perfect. Booted back to 10.04 - perfect! Go figure.

This seems like a pretty stupid bug. 4 weeks ago on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS I installed the OS using a cheap dell monitor on 1280x1024. I've change to a widescreen Ilyama but no matter how many times I change resolution on System Tools > Settings > Displays to 1680x1050 it always defaults to 1280x1024 on restart. It knows I've got an Ilyama 22" screen, just doesn't save the setting.

It's not auto-detection that's broken. The stupid thing is if I use a guest session it goes to 1680x1050. I've never logged in as guest with the Dell monitor, so I'm guessing it saves a default resolution when setting up the user profile first time, then just doesn't save any setting change you make once you're logged in.

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