I have this 1920 x 1080 widescreen monitor and it was seriously one of the best hardware investments, I made in a long time. Totally silly of me to try to stick with 4:3 screens for as long as I did. Anyway, yesterday I started my favourite game and accidentally switched to fullscreen. For an unrelated reason, I had to reboot afterwards and lo and behold, suddenly, 1600 x 1200 was the highest resolution available.K, that kinda puzzles you. Sure, an application should be able to change display resolution, but it should not be able to reconfigure the system. Most certainly not persist the changes between boots. And so an entire day was spent on trying to figure out if:
- Ubuntu offers some funky setuid root binary for reconfiguring X11
- My graphic card has some funky EEPROM for storing config data
- My monitor has an even funkier way of being configured by the host controller
Turn out it was none of the above (but boy, is trying to find a solution with 1600 x 900 stretched to 1920 x 1080 annoying). The display cable on the computer side had become slightly loose, unplugging and plugging it again gave me back my beloved 1920 x 1080. Kinda obvious. VGA is analogue, even a slightly loose plug means loss of bandwidth and that limits resolution.
Lesson learned: the VGA plug has screws for a reason. Fasten them on both sides!
