I am looking at purchasing a new monitor for my Linux box. I was looking at something like this one.

What I need to know before I go out and spend alot of money on this - how well are Widescreen monitors supported on Linux? This monitor has a max resolution of 1680 x 1050. Obviously, I need to set the resolution and refresh rates correctly in xorg.conf.

I know there are lots of threads on LQ about this, but they seem to have conflicting information. My video card is a cheap Nvidia GeForce 6200, with a DVI connection. I am using the Nvidia drivers, on Debian Sid. I have read conflicting stories about widescreen and DVI.
The manual that came with my video card does not mention this resolution, or any other widescreen resolutions. Does this mean that this video card does not support Widescreen?

Any suggestions would be appreciated
Thanks
--Ian

Any modern GeForce card will do widescreen resolutions; you only have to put it in the Xorg.conf file and it will use it.

Getting videos to play in the correct aspect ratio and getting games to play in wide resolutions might be a pain though.

Use gtf to help you create modelines. Games line UT2004 can accept any resolution, but you have to use its console to specify a resolution if the desire resolution is not listed in the drop-down menu. Other games may be similar.

I just set up a new 1440x900 res LCD with my old Nvidia card on Ubuntu 7.04, look here for hints on how to get it going correctly:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=280683

Thanks for the help. I will be buying the monitor I said above, and I will let you know how it goes.

--Ian

Just to let everyone know how this worked - I bought the Viewsonic monitor I mentioned in my previous post.

On Debian SID, it was a simple dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, select the nv driver (no need for the proprietary nvidia driver), and it automagically detected the native resolution to use. Everything works perfectly, including programs such as MythTV.

--Ian

I am running 2 20" wide screen monitors (both 1680x1050) and everything works fine. Video aspects are great, games are working in widescreen (counter-strike and world of warcraft) and everything just works great. I have the lateste nVidia drivers and if you do as well, nvidia-settings is a GREAT tool. I can't stress enough how fantastic a job nVidia does with their linux drivers.

No need for nVidia cards or anything. I'm using a strange SiS chipset (small memory, no 3dfx rendering, ... the usual story with an integrated video card) and widescreen resolution worked out of the box. The only need is that both the card and driver needs to support widescreen resolutions, and as far as I know, pretty much any recent chip will. I've never faced any cards or drivers myself that would not (not on Linux, that is).

Thing to do: modify X configuration to include the preferred (widescreen) resolution(s). Older distributions and some new ones too may use XF86Config or XF86Config-4 but most nowadays seem to use xorg.conf instead. So..become root (su -), or use sudo to do the following:
1) launch (su'ed/sudo'ing) your favourite text-editor
2) open /etc/X11/xorg.conf (read above, if you're XFree86 user)
3) scroll down until you find the section that lists your resolutions. There are several lines probably, one line per one colour depth, and the syntax of the resolutions defined is "WIDTH1xHEIGHT1" "WIDTH2xHEIGHT2" "WIDTH3xHEIGHT3", where WIDTHn, HEIGHTn are corresponding width/height values, 'x' between them, surrounded by quotes ("") and quoted items separated by a whitespace (if I remember right; well, check out what your file says). For example
4) The first resolution (from the left) on each line is the one that is used, if possible. If it fails, second (from the left) is tried and so on, until the end of the list or until one works. To add new resolution, write it before the leftmost existing resolution in the line, maintaining the syntax. Remember to edit each colour depth (resolution line per depth, remember) you want to use.

5) Save, quit and restart X, for example by pressing CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE. See if it worked (and if not, go back fixing things).

On some monitors I've noticed that certain resolutions that should be supported fail, and in some cases it helps to set the Option DPMS off in the above config file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf). That's not for every problematic case, but for some. If you run into errors, copy the errors you get and come here, then ask what went wrong. Or just
and see to the contents of Xorg.errors file after that. Also good idea to run the same command with "EE" replaced with "WW" (warnings instead of errors).

EDIT: the above means that widescreen resolutions for X should work on almost any card. Of course specific software might refuse working on some resolutions, so it depends on the program you're running - perhaps a game - whether or not it's all right for it to run in widescreen resolutions or not. But that's not up to what video card you have, but the software.

I have a widescreen 1680x1050 monitor, and everything worked fine except mplayer which stretched every video horizontally by 20%. To fix it I added the following line in ~/.mplayer/config: Actually jumpnbump doesn't work in fullscreen mode (it uses SDL, which may have something to do with it), so there are the occasional minor issues you'll experience.