It's no secret I like Ubuntu the best. But what strikes me as odd, is that it does not come standard with a good tool to change the display settings. Sure, you can change the Screen Resolution, but what about cloning to another device, extending the desktop to a second screen, changing the driver, or adjusting the refresh rates to enable more resolutions? There currently is no graphical way to do this in GNOME, so for this you had to manually change the X config file, or run a third party tool like nvidia-settings. But now I found a great GTK tool that can do it for you.

Say what?

Changing the monitor, it's drivers or its refresh rates can often open up more possible screen resolutions to choose from. For instance, I had a beamer connected to an Ubuntu workstation. However, I could not get higher resolutions than 640x480, until I defined what device was connected to my video card, and what refresh rates it had. Once I hacked it into the /etc/x11/xorg.conf file, it was all good. But that seems to be so 1998.

I noticed that Red Hat (RHEL5) did come with a solid tool to adjust these settings, and since that was GNOME too, I wanted to find a similar package for Ubuntu.

Turned out there was a great tool available through standard repository that:

• was called DisplayConfigGTK,
• works perfectly on Ubuntu (tested it with Feisty)
• can be easily installed using apt(itude), or Synaptic

I will show you how to install the tool with Synaptic. And then how to use it. Don't worry, this is really going to be a piece of cake.

1. OK, let's install

Installing is really easy with Synaptic. This is the procedure as a flash video:

So let's recap:

1. Click on the System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager menu
2. Click the Search button type displayconfig, and click Search again
3. Right click on displayconfig-gtk and click Mark for Installation
4. Click Apply, and Apply again, the installation begins
5. Click Close

Also close the Synaptic Package Manager, and the Screen Preferences tool is now installed. Great. Ready to use it?

2. How to Run & Use it

Again, a walk in the park. Here's the flash video:

No real need to recap, just press ALT+F2, type displayconfig-gtk and press Run.

And that's it! Now we could adjust almost every display setting there is.
In tab 1 we saw:

• Changing Screen resolutions
• Changing the Refresh rate
• Adjusting Rotation

In tab 2 we saw:

• Cloning to other devices (TVs, beamers)
• Defining additional screens
• Extending the desktop to other screens

In tab 3 we saw:

• Setting the right drivers for every device

And you can first press the Test button before saving the changes, a really nice feature of course.

Additional benefits

This program has got a built-in failsafe mechanism for every time you screw up your X display settings.

Usually when I play around with with compiz-fusion I end up breaking X at some point. So I've encountered my fair share of blue X screens reporting something is wrong with either my driver or my display settings, preventing X from starting normally.

But not this time. Instead of a nasty blue Xorg warning, I was shown a nice DisplayConfigGTK dialog, which allowed me to reconfigure my xorg.conf graphically, and when I saved?... Everything was back to normal again!

Wow! So I did some extra investigating and found: "Furthermore this tool is required for a failsafe mode of the X server to correct misconfigurations." on the DisplayConfigGTK Wiki.

Well that's an awesome improvement in usability, and I think this will put an end to scaring off so much people that are playing around with Ubuntu for the first time. Because the first time I saw that blue X warning, it almost scared me back to Windows, I really didn't know what to do about it, except for reinstalling ;)

On that same Wiki page by the way, I also found that DisplayConfigGTK is going to come standard with the new Ubuntu release: Gutsy (7.10), so it looks like they've read my mind already ;) Well anyway, Gutsy is not going to be here/stable for a few months so enjoy DisplayConfigGTK in Feisty!