Hello,

I have been using the nvidia driver for a while and it's the only driver with decent performance for my nvidia 8400M G on my laptop.

I used this full HD tv to do some coding on and it all worked like a charm. So now I'm trying to connect it to my Samsung lcd tv, an LE37S81B, that has a native resolution of 1360x768. Back in the days when I was using windows I had to manually type this in on the driver configuration page to get this resolution working.

Now the exact same thing happens and my tv seems to report only resolutions like 1920x1080 and 1280x720 back to the driver. This means I can't select the native resolution in the driver but because I hadn't restarted the nvidia x server settings application before I was able to select it as if I was still using that full HD tv and it worked exactly the way I wanted to.

I see a lot of people with this problem and I know a few friends of mine who are experiencing something similar but just gave up on this.

I am looking for a simple way to force this resolution on the hdmi out of my laptop and not face the problem of having to do a lot whenever I want to take it along for a presentation or something.

Things like this bother me more than they should, also because this is the reason some people stay with windows. "Cause at least your hardware works decent on it." The problem here is clearly nvidia/samsung for not having the option in their linux software and reporting the wrong modes in their edid.

I hope someone can help me out with this.

You can try disabling the UseEDID options like it says here:
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree8...igoptions.html
and add your resolution to xorg.conf, although nvidia may ignore it.

Honestly, I prefer nouveau, because it is easier to work around these situations. The only downside right now is no HDMI audio with it.

You may have to force the system to use an xorg.conf file and define your parameters there... A few years back, Xorg went to an autodetect system, ... Fixed some things, broke others.

What you might have to do is a stop service on your login manager, and then do a;
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

That should generate an xorg.conf in /etc/X11/ & from there you may have to edit it (if you're editing at command line, I recommend installing nano,... much better/easier than vi). You should take a look at sample xorg.conf files for your chipset, and the resolution you're looking to display at...

And with TVs,... inevitably it's EDID getting in the way... TVs often do not even report native resolution over their vga ports (if they have one). Many have a "simulated" 1080p resolution, even while they have a native 1360x768 or 1366x768 resolution.

thank you for your comments but with both solutions this is way too much work to do every evening when I connect my laptop to the tv and disconnect it from my second screen. I am looking for a simple way to switch between display resolutions without having to restart my x server. Are there any other ideas?