I just bought a brand new hyper-threaded Toshiba laptop with a widscreen 17" display. Here's the problem: When I try to run a resolution higher than 1024x768, the desktop area is larger than the physical display. I run blackbox but in Gnome, you can't see the bottom toolbar because it's outside of the LCD area. The screen on my laptop is a widescreen so is there a way to change the aspect ratio to fit the desktop on my laptop?

Well, it would help if we knew what distro you were using... basically the answer is gonna be, run the screen config program again, and this time make sure to pick a WideScreen display as your monitor... drakconf for redhat, I dunno for mandrake.

I have the same laptop, and you want to set it to use a custom modeline, I can tell you what you need to change in the X setup... I hope you know a little about configuring X... if not, I can give you more detailed help, just email me personally... anyway, you need a good definition for your laptop as follows

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
HorizSync 40 - 100
VertRefresh 40 - 120
Option "dpms"

Modeline "1440x900" 97.54 1440 1472 1840 1872 900 919 927 946

EndSection

you will also need to get the most recent Nvidia driver for linux... so you can make sure that the video card is running accelerated... get it from here

http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/L...-4496-pkg2.run

then run that script as root and it will setup the nvidia module for Xwindows

Then make sure the section about your graphics card is as follows :

Section "Device"
# no known options
Identifier "Nvidia Driver"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVidia"
BoardName "GeForce"

#BusID
EndSection

Also make sure the Screen settings are as follows:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen 0"
Device "Nvidia Driver"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 16

Subsection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1440x900" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubsection

EndSection

that should do it for you... if you're confused, email me personally at

phil at daviszone dot org

and I can email you the whole config file from my /etc/X11/XF86Config so you can just insert it there, you'll still need to run the Nvidia driver install for the video card... but after that I have beautiful video!

The only two issues I still have with the laptop are that I can use the madwifi driver to startup my built in wireless, but it hangs the machine from time to time and it does all kinds of other odd things, and I can't figure out how to make the grub splash screen readable, of course I know which option is windows and which is linux so I am ok it just bugs me thats all

anyway
hope that helps

Phil

Thanks guys, I figured it out a while back. I generated the modeline and then I had to tweak the nvidia driver a bit. It works great now. I do have one other question, what is a virtual screen? My laptop lists two other higher resoultions and calls them virtual displays. They are 1920x1440 and 2048x1536.

It means it will create a screensize like that resolution, but if the monitor can't handle it, it allows you to pan and move the screen around, i.e. when you move the mouse down, it slides the view area with it, almost like when you have scrollbars on a browser window, but the mouse moves into the area for you... more of a pain in the butt if you asked me...