Widescreen Optimum Use

[James Knott]

Scott Sullivan wrote:
> 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.
>
If the OP only has a VGA connection available, he might not be able to 
do that.  With DVI or HDMI, configuration should be automatic.


--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists