Laptop with external monitor, screen resolution glitches

[Paul Kaplan]

I use kde rather than gnome, so I can offer only some general 
comments/suggestions.

It looks like you might have a 1028x768 screen sitting on top of the 1280x1024 
screen, but with both displaying a 1280x1024 background image.  Thus when you 
click in the upper left portion of the desktop you are only accessing the 
smaller screen.

I've had similar problems, which, at least w/ kde3.x, largely went away when I 
rebuilt /etc/X11/xorg.conf.  If you've retained this file from an earlier 
version of ubuntu, you might have some messed up settings; try commenting out 
all unnecessary lines in the file (check the ubuntu wiki for X or xorg).  
Xorg7.3 works with an extremely minimal config file with most of the config being 
handled on the fly by xrandr (wiki - xrandr).

Use xrandr to see what your working configuration is (a CLI tool).  You can 
either modify from xrandr or try grandr.

If X is fine, you might have a goofy gnome configuration.  I'm not sure what 
directory contains the gnome desktop configuration (the kde equivalent would be 
~/.kde), but you might try renaming it.  Then login again and let the system 
rebuild the file from scratch.

Paul
 
On Saturday 20 September 2008 06:27:42 tchomby wrote:
> Anyone had this problem before?
>
> http://img140.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshotoy4.png
>
> This is a screenshot taken from a laptop with a built-in 1024*768 screen,
> but it's currently using an external monitor which is at 1280*1024. It's
> running Ubuntu 8.04.
>
> As you can see, the screen is at resolution 1280*1024 and all is working
> fine, except that the top panel is only 1024 pixels wide. No matter what I
> do, I can't make it fill the screen. If I drag the top panel down to the
> bottom, it stretches to 1280. If I drag the bottom panel up, then as soon
> as it enters the top left 1024*768 area of the screen it shrinks to 1024.
> There are several other glitches also, for example if I maximise or
> fullscreen a window, it goes to 1024*768.
>
> Basically, the system seems to be in two minds about what resolution it's
> at.
>
> If I got to Monitor Resolution Settings it's set to 1280*1024 and Clone
> Screens is not checked, if I check Clone Screens then I can't choose
> anything above 1024*768.