Sunday, March 28, 2010

Odd 1366x768 LCD res on Nvidia

I bought a LCD monitor (LG Flatron W1943S) months ago for my mother. This desktop PC runs Kubuntu 9.04 with an NVidia 6600 card. I had never been able to fix a problem: about 60 pixels of overscan to the right, which is very awful and annoying specially when you need to move scrollbar...

(My mother with infinite patience has moved too many windows to the left to pick these missing buttons... I would have already thrown the monitor out the window.)

Some further debugging today let me find this:

First, the native resolution 1366x768 is not supported by nvida (the card? the driver?). You need exact 16:9, or multiples of 8, I igore it -- the point is that you need to get the modeline for 1368 horizontal pixels; I used this to generate it and put it on xorg.conf:

$ gtf 1366 768 60
# 1368x768 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 47.70 kHz; pclk: 85.86 MHz
Modeline "1368x768_60.00" 85.86 1368 1440 1584 1800 768 769 772 795

(In Screen section, under a Display subsection, added Modes "1368x768_60.00")
It also works with 1360x768, I still don't know which one is better.

Then, the most important part was in the monitor itself: I read in a forum (about different hardware I think) that there was a "reset to factory defaults" in the monitor. So, afer setting this resolution, I navigated through the unintuitive OSD monitor menu, under Setup - in the last screen - last option is Factory Reset. That simply accomodated all the pixels within the screen! And easier: There is an "auto/set" button that appears to be the same! All this time I was looking for a xorg vs. drivers vs. monitor configuration issue, I never thought it would be that simple.

I am still trying to get a real 1:1 sampling, I see some pixels appearing as "blurred" horizontally. Suggestions are welcome...

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