Displaying Resolution Correctly on WideScreen Laptop

Displaying Resolution Correctly on WideScreen Laptop

Recently I made a switch from a IBM based 14” laptop to Compaq 15.1” Widescreen laptop. I had never experienced any type of difficulty in running fedora on my old laptop right up to Fedora Core 5. But Fixing screen Resolution on my WideScreen laptop turned out to be a very tiring effort. I wanted to set my screen resolution to 1280x800 which was the highest resolution that was supported but even after setting numerous times from the Graphical Display tool that came preinstalled I was unable to change the resolution it always reverted back to 1024x768 resolution . I tried changing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file manually but even this did not work so after quiet a bit of googling around I found a solution to my problem and here it is.

First i changed the Display to a Generic LCD Panel 1280x800 after changing this is what my xorg.conf file looked like

# Xorg configuration created by system-config-display

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "single head configuration"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Synaptics" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"

### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
Identifier "Monitor0"
ModelName "LCD Panel 1280x800"
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
HorizSync 31.5 - 67.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 75.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "i810"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1280x800" "1152x864" "1152x768" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Then the main part I downloaded a tool called 915resolution that modifies the Video Bios of 800 and 900 series intel video-chipsets making temporary changes to include a number of video modes not supported

Here is the link to 915resolution tool :- http://www.geocities.com/stomljen/915resolution-0.5.2.tar.gz

After downloading it I extracted the tool into the /usr/bin directory after becoming the superuser though it can be extracted to any other directory you wish.

First I Displayed a list of available video modes :-

915resolution –l

There was no 1280x800 mode in the list hence I had to insert it .
So what I did was issue command

915resolution 38 1280 800 24

here 38 is the mode number i want to override 24 is the color bits I want. An important thing to note here is that this change is temporary hence will be forgotten by computer once computer is switched off/ Restarted hence I add the following command to /etc/rc.local

/usr/bin/915resolution 38 1280 800 24

This is how my /etc/rc.local file looked like

#!/bin/sh
#
# This script will be executed *after* all the other init scripts.
# You can put your own initialization stuff in here if you don't
# want to do the full Sys V style init stuff.

touch /var/lock/subsys/local
/usr/bin/915resolution 38 1280 800 24

and restarted the computer and voila I was thrown into my new 1280x800 video mode .