Since some time I am a dual-head user. I recently bought a 19" Ilyama 1680x1050 (cool resolution for 19") and it served me well. It is much more smaller than the 24" Dell UltraSharp I have. The differences in the resolution is not that big. The Dell is 1920x1200. Yesterday I saw that Ilyama have a Prolite series monitor, the same as the 19", 22" which has 1920x1200. I have followed in the recent times the 23" line of Samsung - the 2343 NW. Which is about 160 Euro and offers not that standard resolution (2048 x 1152 / 16:9). The resolution is strange, right? But gives the possibility to have 2 browsers at 1024 pixel width next to each other. In the last years the monitors got bigger and cheaper, more real estate. And they got wider. Probably driven by the multimedia market, although widescreen is good also for those who use IDEs.

Now, I am not an IDE user but more space on the X axis will be good, of course, I can have nedit and konsole running next to each other. Will see whether I will experiment with this monitor. For now I am back to the 24". I have installed Ubuntu 8.10 when I had the Ilyama (19") plugged in and it worked well together with my 14" (1400x1050) T60. The nice thing, the vertical number of pixels doesn't differ, which makes the desktop just wider, no dead space. When I unplugged the Ilyama and plugged the Dell the latter started to work at 1680x1050, the resolution of the Ilyama, which is however non-native for the Dell. Very blurry picture :(.

Tried searching with Google. Some people recommend editing of xorg.conf, which I hate. But I found new sources of information. Seems that the screen real estate can be controlled through xrandr. The Gnome screen control panel uses xrandr but doesn't show the errors of the underlying program, not very nice. The real problem was that during the installation Ubuntu has set Virtual 3080 1050 in the xorg.conf and thus XOrg can't have a bigger desktop. Which means that although the 24" has more pixels XRandr can't find them or doesn't want to find them. Editing xorg.conf to set Virtual to (1400 + 1920 = 3320 x 1200) did not work :(. Even after I logged of and logged it. xrandr was still showing (xrandr -q --verbose) the old virtual resolution. Then I just hit CTRL-ALT-Backspace to kill the XOrg, logged it and then the new virtual resolution was used. Then, it was pretty easy to set the 24" to its native resolution. There was a open bug for Ubuntu 8.04 for Virtual and in the comments they say that overwritting Virtual won't be needed in Interpid (Ubuntu 8.10), which I use. Well, this is not true.

P.S.

I don't use 8.04, which has native KDE3 from Canonical, but 8.10 because 8.04 used to overheat my maschine and I had every single day at least one spurious hang of the notebook. Not very nice. Unfortunately 8.10 is shipped only with KDE4, which is just for the garbage bin, but fortunately there are KDE3 fans who provide packages (3.5.10) for all those who find KDE3 more productive than Gnome.

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