Widescreen Optimum Use

[Scott Sullivan]

On 12/15/2009 10:15 AM, Stephen wrote:
> --- On Tue, 12/15/09, john.moniz-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org<john.moniz-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org>  wrote:
>
>    
>> I recently bought an LCD monitor for my mother-in-law. She
>> was looking for a square monitor, but all there is nowadays
>> is the widescreen. It's a Samsung 21.5" screen.
>>
>> She is using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (I know, I should upgrade it
>> for her one of these days). With the widescreen, the
>> background picture gets spread out and looks very unnatural.
>>  From the settings on the monitor itself, I restricted the
>> screen to a square size. The background looks good, but
>> there's a lot of real estate unnecessarily lost.
>>
>> What's the best way to handle a widescreen monitor? I'd be
>> happy with having the background picture cut back to a
>> square, but would like the icons and any open applications
>> to use the full screen.
>>
>> I've never heard anyone complain about this before, so it
>> must be something silly I've done or overlooked.
>>      
> My widescreen monitors work fine without any effort on my part. Now, I am using the latest Ubuntu.
>
> My guess is that upgrading would solve your problem.
>
> And the time to upgrade would be much less than solving the problem in the current version.
>
> Stephen
>    

This is not an issue of the monitor being supported, it's actually very 
simply PEBKAC (to be blunt, sorry).

Put the monitor in the Resolution that it's supposed to be, then find 
the background preferences. Gnome lets you set what's called background 
Style: Tiled, Zoom, Center, Scaled and Fill Screen. Play around with 
those until you find a version your mother-in-law likes.

Failing that, open her original background in an image editor and scale 
and crop it in a manner that would fit the wide screen aspect ratio.

-- 
Scott Sullivan


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