After setting my monitor up, I found it didn’t exactly match the other devices on my kvm switch. I could get around this by pressing the “Auto Adjust” button on the monitor, but that meant I’d have to adjust again when I switched to a different machine.
Usually, what I do in these cases is to use xvidtune to fine-tune things. Unfortunately, that didn’t work - it would always fail with “Unable to query monitor info” even when I disconnected the kvm switch and went directly into the monitor.
What that meant is that I’d have to hack the modeline manually. I found a good discussion of modelines here.
A modeline has the following format:
name dotclock hsize hsyncstart hsyncend htotal vsize vsyncstart vsyncend vtotal hsyncpol vsyncpol
I needed to move the image on my monitor to the right (I had a black bar on the right hand side, and the left hand side was clipped off). To move the monitor right, I needed to DECREASE hsyncstart and hsyncend by the same amount. (Then I logged out and logged back in to restart X so the new settings were being used.)
Once the screen was more or less centred, I DECREASED htotal to make the display wider. (And then logged out and logged in again…)
After that, the image was still a little further right than I wanted, so I DECREASED hsyncstart and hsyncend again to get the wider display centered again. One more restart of X and things were groovy.
My current modeline is: Section "Monitor" Identifier "Configured Monitor" # 1280x1024 59.89 Hz (CVT 1.31M4) hsync: 63.67 kHz; pclk: 109.00 MHz # Modeline "1280x1024_60.00" MHz HSize HTotal HSyncEnd HSyncDelay VSize VSyncStart VSyncEnd VTotal HSyncPol VSyncPol Modeline "1280x1024_60.00" 109.00 1280 1322 1450 1700 1024 1027 1034 1066 -hsync +vsync EndSection
Now things are automatically adjusted when I switch from one box to another.
Note: This won’t work if you aren’t currently displaying something in the mode you want to use. Also, keep a copy of your original values in your xorg.conf file just in case things go awry - it’s possible to put all your controls offscreen, which can make things challenging.