My setup- MSI 890FXA-GD70 Mother board, 8MB ram, AMD Phenom II Black edition 1090T processor , GPU Nvidia GTX 460. Running Ubuntu 16.04.

What is the procedure for installing a new monitor (Asus VS 239H). Haven't installed one in 8 years and don't remember, also don't want to make a mistake.

Also, what drivers do you guys use?

I'll take those specs as 8 Gigs of ram. Otherwise, go out & buy some.

These days you just throw on a monitor and X does it's thing "What have we here?" etc. If any issues arise, put the specs in xorg.conf.d which is just the video part of xorg.conf. I have a
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-video.conf with configuration for a laptop screen, hdmi, & smaller resolution projector on a hdmi output. You need:
* ServerLayout section (i.e what's connected to what).
* Sections for each configured device.
* Device section for the card driving each.
* Screen sections for each possible screen.

X doesn't complain about missing devices, but uses what it finds. The xorg.conf man page is a start, but google is probably better if you need spoon feeding. I do sometimes.

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In Ubuntu and friends (derivatives)
shut down. plug it in.
Start up. Login
"Display" on the menu, or thereabouts.

Connect an extra monitor
may be of further help.

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I'll second the proper shutdown, remove AC cable and press power button a few times. Then swap displays.

It should for the most part auto adjust to what you want. It is not like a million years ago where you have to describe it in settings.

It is only slightly possible that you may have to adjust stuff. I use Ubuntu on a flash drive from machine to machine and it works fine.

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As everyone says, just swap monitors when the computer is off and that's it. You might need to fiddle a bit with the controls on the monitor, as explained in the manual, to get the best appearance, but it will work.

Don't worry about xorg.conf: Ubuntu doesn't have one and only the most old-school distros do.

In the unlikely event that your old monitor is a CRT (well, some people still have them!) you might like to find the tool in the menu for font display and switch the rendering to subpixel smoothing to get slightly sharper text.

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As said plug it in while the computer is off. It should mostly work out of the box. Not to say that you wont need to fiddle depending on things. But you will be able to see something out of the box.

In the case of an external display to my laptop, on debian it defaults to the lowest common denominator since the LCD of the laptop and the external is cloned by default. So 1024x768 pixels on both. But xrandr corrects that in short order. And the color on some monitors can suck, even in 2017. On my HP 27wm, I really need to adjust the colors. Bear in mind the 1.0 is the default value:

$ xrandr --output HDMI-0 --brightness 0.6 --gamma 1.6:1.4:1.53

when watching videos

$ xrandr --output HDMI-0 --brightness 0.5 --gamma 1.25:1.15:1.22

when reading text and not wanting to burn my retinas out.

$ xrandr --output HDMI-0 --brightness 1 --gamma 1:1:1

being the default. Which makes maps.google.com almost useless since you can't see any of the map detail because it is soo bright.

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