Wild-Heart.net

All to frequently, I am reminded that while I love to tinker and fight my way through Linux user difficulties and make my OS bend to my will, I never post my solutions. That’s rather thoughtless of me and I swear I’ll try to better from now on. This latest difficulty was getting an actual widescreen resolution that our Vizio HDTV would recognize and that my ATI video card would display.

You might wonder why I would even want to go through this trouble. Well, this school year, instead of having one of the boys homeschooling using an online school, we have two and we really needed another computer running in our homeschool area of the livingroom. Both Boy #2 and Baby Boy are early risers and do their best work in the morning. With only one windows pc for their use it became obvious last week that we were going to struggle and fight if we didn’t build another frankenputer this weekend. But that left the question of where was my computer going to go? The only logical solution was to bring it upstairs. I honestly am not at my computer very often. I stop by and check my email and IM’s and downloads through the day but aside from that, I’m too busy with the boys. So here I now sit at the loveseat that is placed at the end of our bed with my computer attached to the 26″ HDTV.

For two days all I could get the television to work with the video card was a resolution of 1024×768. It wasn’t pretty. Well, It was pretty but it was also pretty stretched on the horizontal. No amount of configuration of xoorg.conf seemed to solve the problem. I searched the Ubuntu formums to no avail. Every solution found there failed. I did however find one mention of setting the modeline in xorg.conf for the monitor to be specific for the video card. It took me over 12 hours of more searching to find a way ti fingure out how to go about figuring what the modeline for my video card would be. Eventually I found this HOWTO Widescreen Resolutions on Gentoo-wiki.org.

As you can see their instructions are specific for an Nvidia card but the same theory applies for ATI/fglrx. If you have an ATI card and drivers insalled and having the same difficulties here are the lines in Xorg.0.log that we (yes, even Joseph happily joined in on the Linux fun this time) found and used to make my custom modeline for xorg.conf:

(II) fglrx(0): Supported additional Video Mode:
(II) fglrx(0): clock: 85.5 MHz Image Size: 1096 x 640 mm
(II) fglrx(0): h_active: 1360 h_sync: 1424 h_sync_end 1536 h_blank_end 1792 h_border: 0
(II) fglrx(0): v_active: 768 v_sync: 771 v_sync_end 777 v_blanking: 795 v_border: 0

From that information we were able to use the sample on the gentoo wiki page linked above to come up with the following custom modeline to add to Section: “Monitor”:

ModeLine "1360x768" 85.5 1360 1424 1536 1792 768 771 777 795

After that we also added the resolution that is listed in that modeline (1360×768) to all of the display lines. Saved everything and rebooted while saying prayers with crossed fingers and held breath. Viola! I now have a happy and perfectly displayed widescreen resolution with linux. I hope this can be of some help to someone out there because honestly the information on setting up xorg to work with a widescreen HDTV is very slim.