Ubuntu

setting text-console to a widescreen video mode

Asked by Bogdan Butnaru

Hi! I have a Dell Latitude D620 laptop. It has an Intel 915 video card (or a variant of it) and a 1280x800 widescreen display. I'm using Ubuntu Feisty.

The screen is OK for a laptop, and I'd like to take maximum advantage of it.

I hate the look of a 4:3 mode stretched to the 19:10 aspect, so I set the BIOS to disable stretching. I got Xorg to use the native resolution easily, with the 915 resolution package.

However, I can't set the text console to the native resolution. I checked the web a lot, and seen many pages like http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~gerald/laptop/vesafb.txt but I didn't find much about both text-mode console and widescreen. I resorted to a vga=791 that sets the console to 1024x768 (I think), which looks OK with stretching disabled, but doesn't use the whole screen width.

Ideally, I'd like everything starting with Grub to use 1280x800. I doubt grub can be forced to do this without major hacking, and since it doesn't have that much to display it's OK if the res is changed when Linux boots. It's also OK if I can use vga=791 at start and have the res changed a bit later during the boot process, too, if it's impossible to do more.

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Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb) said : 		#1

BTW, somewhat unrelated, perhaps: I just remembered that there was a time when during boot there was a boot splash image, but there was also the text of the boot process below it. Is that still available?

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Benoit Malet (benoit-malet) said : 		#2

Hello !

I found on a forum that this should do the trick (to be added to the correct line in menu.lst, but you seem to know it already):

vga=0x360 video=vesafb:mtrr,1280x800-16@72

If it doesn't work, try removing the frequency part (remove the @72) or adapt it to your screen refresh rate. 16 stands for 16 bits colors ...

Hope this solves your problem !

Regards,
Benoît

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Bogdan Butnaru (bogdanb) said : 		#3

Unless I misunderstood most of what I read on the net on the subject, I think that line only works if the kernel has vesafb (and probably vesafb-tng) compiled into the kernel. As far as I can tell, Ubuntu has it compiled as a module only, which means it's not accessible at boot time. Anyway, it doesn't work for me, so I think I'm right. I'm not sure if having a module is intentional, I'll look a bit around and see what I can find.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#4

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.