[Hardy] GNOME and GDM are starting up with wrong display resolution

Please attach your /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Sounds like you have the intel driver which doesn't support more than 2048x2048 sized screen.

Yes, I have a Intel 965GM chipset with GMA X3100 graphics core. But I always use only one display at the same time, either the notebook panel or the external display.

Have you added your screen configuration to xorg.conf manually?
Try running "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg" again, this may remove you external screen configuration and let xorg handle it on-the-fly in a better way. (it will backup your xorg.conf so dont worry).

Yes I added some lines manually. Have a look at the attachment to see what the xorg.conf file looks like now. GDM still starts with wrong resolution (I think it is 1280x1024). I don't know how the display is handled on startup. xrandr detects the right resolutions but it doesn't take the highest/native one.

xorg.conf looks better. At this point, have you reconfigured your screens with the graphical configuration tool (gnome-display-properties) ?
Does it detect your screen resolution properly?

Yes I have reconfigured the screen with gnome-display-properties. This worked as expected but only affects GNOME and not GDM of course.

It may not be helpful at all, but I was having a similar problem and had to change a line in xorg.conf which you do not have. Honestly, I don't know how the line got there (I suspect it appeared during the Hardy install, but I am not sure).

Anyway, my GDM resolution should have been 1280x1024 but my greeters did not appear properly. Rather, it looked as though the greeter was stretched to 1600x1200 and I could not see the bottom and right sides of the greeter. In my xorg.conf I had a line in the screen section:

 virtual 1600 1200

Changing that line to 1280 1024 fixed the GDM greeter resolution problem for me. Is there any possibility these are related? Good luck.

I just reread your problem and it seems I have interposed something here which makes no sense at all. It seemed more related before (or maybe I was looking at a different bug report). Sorry.

Does the problem even appear with final Ubuntu Hardy Live CD? The external monitor and docking station have to be connected directly on boot.

I haven't tried it with a live CD. But the problem appears with a freshly installed Ubuntu 8.04 (final version). It doesn't matter if the notebook is connected to the docking station or not on boot. The behaviour is the same.

My suspicion here is that the LVDS doesn't have its preferred mode set properly, and so gdm is randomly picking 1280x1024 from that. But that's just a guess. Most likely this requires a quirk.

The way to test this theory would be to add the following to your xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
        ...
        Option "PreferredMode" "1680x1050"
EndSection

If that makes everything work properly for you, then I'll look into getting a quirk added for it.

It seems not to work. I have attached my current xorg.conf file.

Hi Johannes,

I've forwarded this bug upstream to https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16760. Please subscribe yourself to this bug, so that if upstream needs further information or wishes you to test something, you can work with them directly. Thanks ahead of time!

The xrandr output in Intrepid is different than in Hardy. Now there are more/other supported modes. Now I have a resolution of 1440x900 on both displays when GDM appears which is much nicer.

xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 1680 x 1950
VGA disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
LVDS connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
   1440x900 60.0 + 50.0
   1360x768 59.8
   1152x864 60.0
   1024x768 60.0
   800x600 60.3 56.2
   640x480 59.9
TMDS-1 connected 1680x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 434mm x 270mm
   1680x1050 59.9*+
   1600x1024 60.2
   1400x1050 60.0
   1280x1024 75.0 60.0 60.0
   1440x900 59.9
   1280x960 60.0
   1360x768 59.8
   1152x864 75.0 75.0 75.0 70.0 60.0
   1024x768 75.1 75.0 70.1 60.0
   832x624 74.6
   800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2
   640x480 75.0 72.8 75.0 60.0 59.9
   720x400 70.1
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

Thanks for letting us know the issue is resolved in Intrepid.