I'd like to connect my ATi Radeon Mobility 9600 laptop up to my HD LCD TV and have found it very difficult to get the exact resolution in XP and Ubuntu (though I'm still fiddling with the latter). This is the standard resolution for LCD TVs yet seems to have no build-in support in any OS.

Is there a distro that can do this witout messing around with editing manual config files? The easier the better.

Thanks!

No. For an ati card to work in full you need to either install the drivers from the site or recompile the kernel or both.

Ok, what if it wasn't ATi? I've also got nvidia and integrated graphics in my desktop and other laptop. Is there any distro that offers a GUI for setting custom resolutions? I'd like to have the option of doing it, even if it won't display on the screen because of the drivers.

What does everyone else with HDTVs do?

Because the full drivers are all proprietary, you have to get them from the manufacturers site. Installing them is usually fairly easy as long as a) your card is listed as supported and b) you follow all instructions to the letter.

Nvidia cards are the easiest to install, in my experience.

Yes, Yes, the problem is not neccesarily in the driver. I have a Nvidia Geforce FX5500 in my mythtv box and I could never get 1366x768 on my Syntax Olevia 32" LCD TV. However, there is hope. I did manage to get a 16:9 ratio screen with 1280x720 which is pretty reasonable and is where I quit trying to do anymore. I must note, however, that you MUST use the DVI inputs on your TV, which means that you need a GFX card with DVI outputs. I could post the relevant parts of my xorg.conf under Xubuntu if you want.

I've been using a regular VGA cable as that's all my laptop supports. I found 1024x768 was pretty readable, for some reason 1280x768 had very corrupted fonts. I've managed to get 1360x768 in XP but the TV automatically stretches the picture so I really need those extra 6 pixels. I don't believe the drivers are the primary concern here, software is the main issue as without that you can't even try and customise the resolution. With XP I've been using a program called Powerstrip that got me the 1360x768 but it's too complicated and for some reason 1366x768 is unachievable, possibly because of the drivers.

With Linux I was hoping for a way to just specify that I want to select 1366x768 and see what happens. So any specific distro or easy to use piece of software someone can recommend would be of great help.

Sorry to get back so late, I was sortof busy.

I have only been able to attain 1280x768 with a DVI cable. You MUST use one or I have found it doesn't work too well. 1024x768 isn't a good mode to use on an HDTV because it(1024x768) is a 4/3 aspect ratio where all HDTVs are 16/9. If you can somehow attach a DVI cable I will post my xorg.conf(dapper,xorg 7.0) for you. Cheers.

<<Samoth>>

Hi,

Can you post your xorg.conf, I'm having problem with connecting to olevia tv as well. Everything on the screen looks really really really huge.

Thanks.