Ok, I'm using Xandros 3.02 and I was forced to switch monitors due to a physical failure. I've now got a Princeton Ultra 72 17" CRT on an ATI 3D Rage Pro AGP card. It's beautiful. BUT... Horizontally, it's too big. Far too big. If I put the screen in the middle, it lops off almost all of the Launch button and 3 or 4 icons into the right side of the KDE panel. It's not totally unusable, but it's HIGHLY annoying. I have been all over the Settings tab in Display Properties, and tried every possible resolution and refresh rate. All have the same issue. There's also a severe pincushion effect.

My first thought for both of these issues was simply to make manual adjustments to the monitor settings (as in on the front of the monitor itself). This only helped slightly. There is still a strong pincushion, and the sides of the display are still quite out of physical visible range of the monitor.

I feel there HAS to be a method in KDE to adjust how WIDE the overall display is. I know that video card drivers under Windows have similar options quite frequently.

If the solution involves doing any CLI work or editing any config files, you're gonna have to tell me where they are and how to use any commands. I'm still a linux newb, especially when it comes to actually USING the OS via the CLI.

Try Alt+Ctrl+- . Using the "+" will increase resolution and "-" will reduce resolution. If this does not resolve the problem then you may have to reconfigure X. But try this first.

That changed the inherent resolution, and now I have scrolling vertically and horizontally based on where my mouse cursor is. If anything, the problem is now worse. I now have conditional visibility on the top and bottom, and still NO visibility on the sides, without adjusting the monitors horizontal position. It's almost like the machine thinks the monitor is bigger than it is, and I need to set it to show 1024x768, but fit the entire GUI into a space with 100 pixels shaved off either side, and centered.

Apparently, I need to change the X configuration. How do I do that?

EDIT: After cycling through the resolutions some more, I've gotten it back to the way it was. Still no visibility on the left and right, but vertically it's fine.

The Debian way is as root do dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 and when you get to the monitor section use the advanced option and enter the relevant resolution. If you are using X.org then I cannot help.

I'm using whatever came with the free circulation distribution of Xandros. I believe it's just X11, but it's running KDE.

On a new note, I DID get it (using xvidtune) to FIT all inside the screen. It's now usable, but the severe pincushion effect is still quite prevalent. But it's usable.

And I tried the same monitor on an old K6-2 machine TRYING to install Windows 98, and it too was beyond the edges of the screen. Which leads me to believe that the problem lies in the monitor circuitry itself.

That, and upon closer investigation, I found that the horizontal size and pincusion adjustments on the monitor itself don't just do too little, they do absolutely nothing. Thanks for the help, I learned quite a bit!

One Note: if it is the monitor circuitry cutting off the edges, you won't be able to scroll the viewport around to the edges, so that will tell you which it is, basically

(I have a wonderful-but-old CTX that now has this problem (sigh), and it looks like I will have to fix it myself... I can probably do this; it *probably* just a few caps replaced...)

Anyway, scroll == X, noscroll (probably) == monitor.

best.