Adding New Screen Resolutions in Linux MInt

Because 800x600 is too low-res even for the console

In this day and age, I thought that plugging my laptop into a KVM switch with a known monitor on the other end it would just work but apparently I had over estimated our current level of technology and I was left with a very nice 1920x1080 monitor running at a ludicrous 800x600. Whatever the switch was doing, it meant that Mint couldn't detect the monitor and allow me to select a sensible resolution.

So how do you tell Mint to stop being stupid and run a monitor at a given resolution? This post on the Linux Mint Community site had the answer. In summary, do the following:

• First, create a 'modeline' using cvt - this is the configuration line that will be added to the monitor settings and contains info on refresh rate, vsync, etc. Note that this use the VESA standard and so should be compatible with pretty much everything.

~ $ cvt 1920 1080
# 1920x1080 59.96 Hz (CVT 2.07M9) hsync: 67.16 kHz; pclk: 173.00 MHz
Modeline "1920x1080_60.00"  173.00  1920 2048 2248 2576  1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync

• This mode info now needs to be added to the monitor settings using xrandr and the info from the above Modeline:

xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_60.00"  173.00  1920 2048 2248 2576  1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync
xrandr --addmode VGA1 "1920x1080_60.00"

This setting should now be added to the list of default options given for the monitor. Note that this isn't permanent and won't survive a reboot - however, I very rarely reboot my laptop anyway (yay linux!) and the original blog post has info about how to do this if you want to give it a try.