Metamodes and Resolutions

Take a look at this

One of the confusing things I have on my system is several ways to change screen resolution:

1. nvidia-settings (From the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, and is under Applications > System Tools >  NVIDIA X Server settings)
2. displayconfig-gtk (Under System > Administration > Screens and Graphics)
3. gnome-display-properties (Under System > Preferences > Screen Resolution)

Here’s what I’ve discovered while messing about:

nvidia-settings

If you make xorg.conf changes, use nvidia-settings – and do it as root, because it needs to write to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. You still need to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf by hand to add metamodes, because you can’t edit metamodes from the NVIDIA GUI here. (You can delete them, and a copy of an existing one, but you can’t edit it.)

Changes here are applied immediately, and most of the screen fiddling can be done here.

displayconfig-gtk

Don’t use this ever if you are using NVIDIA  proprietary drivers, because it will goof it up and put you back into nv or vesa generic drivers and I can’t remember all the jibber-jabber to get the actual NVIDIA drivers to show up. I did get them to show up once here, but the last time I accidentally goofed around here, I couldn’t figure out how to do it, and I ended up just re-installing the NVIDIA drivers from the command prompt.

gnome-display-properties

Here is a good thing I found out: I had got my dual monitors working as described earlier, but for some reason when I would log in, I would lose the second monitor. It was present for the gdm login screen. Going into nvidia-settings and changing the metamode would always bring the second monitor back up, but that is obviously not what you want to do.

I found that this setting was on 1920×1200, which I assume caused it to select the metamode that had only one monitor. By setting this to 3840×1200, both monitors come up everytime!