[TriLUG] 1440x900 resolution in Dapper

Alan Porter porter at trilug.org
Tue Oct 17 18:16:44 EDT 2006


I had a similar problem with a D505.  It turns out that Dell
has this crazy video BIOS that does not know about the
widescreen resolutions.  So when X starts up and probes
the BIOS, it returns some "standard" resolution like 1024x768.

The fix involves poking the desired resolution into some
unused slot in the video BIOS memory at run time.  This
trick has to be done every time you reboot.  On my D505,
I created a startup script that runs this:

   /usr/local/bin/855resolution 5c 1400 1050

You can put it in rc.local, if you have one (make sure this
runs before runlevel 3 and not after).  Or you can do like
I did and create a script in /etc/init.d/alan_i810_video like
this:

root at d505:/etc # cat init.d/alan_i810_video
#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
  start)
    /usr/local/bin/855resolution 5c 1400 1050
    ;;
esac

And link it to the runlevel scripts in /etc/rcX.d/

root at d505:/etc # ls -l rc*/*alan*
rc2.d/S12alan_i810_video -> ../init.d/alan_i810_video
rc3.d/S12alan_i810_video -> ../init.d/alan_i810_video
rc4.d/S12alan_i810_video -> ../init.d/alan_i810_video
rc5.d/S12alan_i810_video -> ../init.d/alan_i810_video


Alan






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