Hi all,
I installed Mandrake 10.1 last night, and all went smoothly, and I set my screen resolution to 1920x1200 since I have a 15.4 inch wide monitor (64 mb GeForce FX Go5200).
However, when I rebooted into linux, It didn't stretch the screen to the edges, it just stopped at about the average screen size, and when I moved my mouse to the edge, it scrolled in that direction. I tried setting the resolution to 1024x1200 (or whatever), but this time it stretched the screen from edge to edge and the text was kind of hard to read.
So heres my question: how do I set it up to have a 1920x1200 screen resolution and be from edge to edge?

There are really two things involved when trying to get the screen
of a laptop to look right. One is the resolution, the other is the
actual screen size.

The resolution you seem to have set correctly.

As for the screen size

1. On my toshiba laptop, in the bios setup page, there is an option
to "stretch the smaller image to fit the screen". With this option set,
even if I choose 640x400, it will fill the screen.

2. I am a suse user, so you will have the supply the details for mdk.
Using YAST, the suse system administration tool, I can go to the monitor
setup page. There is a screen that allows me to enter the size of the
screen in mm. My 15.4 inch screen is 330mmX205mm. When I set this
properly, circles are displayed without distortion.

Hope this helps.

There are no modelines available in the monitor database for that resolution.

When X.org fails to find a correct modeline, it will resort to a lower resolution and scroll the screen to give you the requested resolution in a virtual manner.

Note: this can also happen when X.org fails to recognize video card capabilities or installs the wrong driver as well.

For my Widescreen laptop screen I found the correct modeline in a forum specific to that model.

Others have reported that they have used powerstrip in windows (or other Linux utilities) to produce the required configuration lines.