ubuntu-x-swat team mailing list archive

[Bryce Harrington <874241@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

So, what's going on here is that the display manager is setting the
displays to mirrored.  In X, 'mirror' means 'find a common resolution
supported by both monitors'.  Unfortunately, in cases where the aspect
ratio of the two displays differ, there will be zero XxY resolutions
they have in common, and so X has to select the default VESA mode of
1024x768 (or one of the smaller required modes like 640x480 or worse).

While this is the expected behavior, you're right that it looks really
bad, and since it's the first thing people see it gives a poor
impression.  Certainly doesn't fill one with confidence that multihead
in unity is going to work well.

Unfortunately, most options to solve this have fairly nasty corner cases
that can leave users with an unusable system, or at least extremely
confused.  So, I agree this is a bad problem, just not sure how it
should be fixed.

Fwiw, I experimented with scaling the external monitor while it is at
1024x768:

  xrandr --output HDMI2 --scale 1.333333x1

and that looked better.  However the text looked bad (mis-hinted?) and
it did nothing for the black bars on the laptop display, so this isn't
even a viable workaround.

** Changed in: xserver-xorg-video-intel (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided => High

** Changed in: xserver-xorg-video-intel (Ubuntu)
       Status: Incomplete => Triaged

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/874241

Title:
  Wrong resolutions in lightdm login screen when using external monitor
  connected to laptop

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